Vikrant Massey wears a waistcoat in this picture that looks slightly too short in the torso, pulling up every time he reaches across a mahogany desk to pour another cup of tea that nobody ever drinks.

That little wardrobe half-inch bothers me more than the logic gaps in the third act, if I'm honest, because it anchors the character in a specific, dusty kind of mofussil bureaucracy where nothing quite fits the way it ought to. Director Pavan Kirpalani wants to squeeze old-school Gothic chills out of a sprawling Gujarati estate that looks like a damp architectural catalogue, complete with sweeping staircases and shuttered wings where the air smells of old wool and damp floorboards. The screenplay by Neha Sharma tries to keep a half-dozen secrets spinning on rusted skewers, shuffling characters from shadowy hallways to moonlit courtyards while Sara Ali Khan navigates the wheelchair-bound Meesha with a pinched, defensive posture. It is a slow-burn setup that relies heavily on atmospheric dread rather than immediate carnage, dragging us through endless conversations about missing fathers and disputed wills that occasionally test your patience.

Sara Ali Khan plays Meesha with her shoulders pulled almost up to her ears, generating a physical tension that works well when she is wheeling herself through claustrophobic corridors in the dead of night, though her dialogue delivery occasionally flattens out into a monotone during the exposition-heavy showdowns. Bollywood movies have spent decades trying to replicate the kind of Hitchcockian paranoia that Gaslight aims for, but our actors often get stranded between naturalistic modern acting and the melodramatic demands of the thriller genre. Chitrangda Singh manages to sidestep this trap by playing her stepmother Rukmini with a glassy, terrifying sort of poise that suggests she knows every skeleton buried under the floorboards and has already coordinated her curtains to match them. She doesn't raise her voice even when things get genuinely hairy in the estate's sprawling library, which makes her far more menacing than any amount of sudden jump scares involving flickering chandeliers or creaking floorboards. Massey, meanwhile, operates as the local estate manager with a constant half-smile that never quite reaches his eyes, playing the middleman with enough oily charm to keep you guessing whether he is going to save Meesha or push her down the well.

The cinematography by Krishnendu Ghosh leans hard into sickly greens and muddy browns, treating the grand old mansion not as a heritage property but as a rotting molar that needs pulling, though some of the night sequences are lit so darkly you will find yourself straining to see which character is standing behind the pillar. The background score by Ketan Sodha relies on heavy cello drones and sudden orchestral stabs that telegraph every single scare about three seconds before it actually happens, robbing the suspense of its bite. It is a loud, intrusive soundtrack that constantly tells you how to feel, much like Ram Gopal Varma’s 1999 horror experiment Kaun, though without that film's delicious economy of space or singular focus. You notice the boom mic dipping into the top edge of the frame during a tense conversation in the foyer, and once you see it, the illusion of a haunted house starts leaking like a cheap umbrella in a monsoon downpour.

Beneath the genre machinery and the sudden plot twists involving hidden identities, the film is really about the terrifying vulnerability of being a young woman who refuses to be gaslit by the very people who stand to inherit her life, a theme that feels urgent even when the plotting gets bogged down in silly contrivances. Hindi cinema has rarely known what to do with female agency inside domestic spaces, usually turning them into weeping victims or avenging angels without leaving room for the messy middle where Meesha operates. She is suspicious, paranoid, often unlikable, and entirely justified in her terror, which gives the narrative a jagged edge that survives even the clunkiest of the script's late revelations. The estate becomes a physical manifestation of generational rot, where everyone is guarding a secret ledger and nobody is willing to look anyone else directly in the eye.

Pavan Kirpalani loses his grip on the pacing right around the hour mark, trading genuine atmospheric dread for repetitive cat-and-mouse games in the dark that start to feel like filler designed to pad the runtime out to two hours. You start wishing the characters would just stop walking down long hallways with flickering candles and simply call the police or check the security footage, but that would ruin the required mood. It is a middle-tier genre exercise that works best when it trusts its actors to do the heavy lifting in close-up shots rather than relying on CGI moths or sudden thunderclaps. That waistcoat on Massey still bothers me, though, sitting awkwardly above his belt like a reminder that even the most carefully constructed mysteries often fray at the seams.