Vikram Bhatt’s entire cinematic output has long felt like an extended clearinghouse for European gothic furniture that nobody else wanted, and Ghost keeps that specific junk shop aesthetic alive with a vengeance. Right around the twenty-minute mark, there is a shot of a chandelier that sways with such aggressive disregard for actual physics that I actually paused to check if I was watching a comedy. It is a small thing but it bugged me, mostly because the film wants us to take its courtroom melodrama seriously while surrounding its human actors with props that look like they were papier-mached by sleep-deprived interns in a basement in Film City. Bollywood horror has rarely known what to do with silence, preferring instead to blanket every single frame in a synthesized drone that sounds suspiciously like a broken vacuum cleaner, and Bhatt leans into this sonic laziness with alarming enthusiasm. The screenplay lurches forward on the back of plot conveniences so absurd they would make a daytime soap opera writer blush, weaving a convoluted yarn about a British politician accused of murdering his wife while claiming a supernatural entity did the dirty work.

Sanaya Irani steps into this theatrical mess as a high-powered attorney who takes the case because she apparently has nothing better to do on a rainy Tuesday, carrying herself with the rigid posture of someone who spent her entire trailer time practicing her serious face in the mirror. There is an unmistakable sincerity to her work here, which often makes the surrounding silliness even harder to swallow, since she is playing every overwritten monologue with the grim determination of a stage actor doing Arthur Miller in a drafty community center. Shivam Bhaargava, on the other hand, spends most of the runtime looking like he wandered onto the wrong set while searching for the canteen, delivering his lines with a flat, bewildering cadence that suggests English might be an aggressive suggestion rather than a language he actually speaks. When these two share a scene, the chemistry between them resembles that of two strangers trapped in an elevator that smells faintly of old cabbage, neither one entirely sure how they ended up in the same vertical metal box.

The cinematography relies heavily on the kind of murky blue filter that has been gathering dust in the back of digital cameras since the early aughts, plunging every single interior into a permanent state of twilight that hides more than it reveals. It feels remarkably similar to what Ram Gopal Varma was doing twenty years ago with Darna Mana Hai, only without the playful irony or the occasional flash of genuine visual wit that kept those older Hindi films watchable despite their budget limitations. Instead of building actual tension through pacing or framing, the camera simply rushes toward people's faces whenever something loud happens on the soundtrack, a jarring trick that gets old about the fourth time it is deployed in a single sequence. The lighting is so aggressively moody that characters frequently converse in rooms where the only apparent light source is a suspicious neon green exit sign, casting sickly shadows across foreheads while everyone talks in hushed, dramatic whispers about demonic possession and political conspiracies.

Beneath the creaking floorboards of the narrative lies a half-baked rumination on guilt, trauma, and the legal system's total inability to process grief, though the movie abandons these half-formed thoughts the second a ghost needs to rattle a teacup. Hindi movies have long struggled with the middle ground between psychological horror and loud, obnoxious creature features, usually choosing to abandon all subtlety the moment the box office pressure starts mounting. Bhatt is an old hand at this particular brand of cinematic recycling, having spent decades churning out horror flicks that trade in cheap jump scares and endless close-ups of terrified eyeballs, and his direction here lacks any sense of discovery or danger. The courtroom scenes are staged with the spatial awareness of a middle school play, featuring extras who sit behind the railing looking bored out of their minds while lawyers shout objections that carry the emotional weight of a grocery list.

There is a strange comfort to be found in watching a film that is so completely unpretentious about its own lack of quality, refusing to dress up its B-movie ambitions in prestige clothing. It reminds you of the kind of late-night television programming you used to stumble across on cable when you couldn't sleep, where the budget was low, the dialogue was laughable, and everyone involved was just trying to get through the shoot before craft services packed up for the day. Watching Bhaargava try to look haunted while standing next to a poorly rendered CGI fog bank is an experience that defies traditional criticism, occupying that strange space where art ceases to matter and pure endurance takes over. You sit there in the dark, watching the credits finally crawl up the screen while wondering how many more times we have to endure men in grey suits talking about ancient curses in poorly insulated soundstages across Mumbai.