There is a specific sound a film makes when it is running entirely on the fumes of its star’s residual goodwill, a sort of polite, rhythmic clatter that usually emanates from multiplexes around the second weekend of an October release when nobody is quite sure what ticket to buy. If I'm honest, I spent the first twenty minutes of *Tutak Tutak Tutiya* trying to figure out why the colour grading on Sonu Sood’s shirts kept shifting from a dusty marigold to a violent tangerine between one reverse-shot and the next, which is perhaps not the intellectual engagement Vijay Alagappan’s direction was hoping to invite, but it kept my eyes occupied while the plot struggled to locate its footwear.

The premise is ancient and slightly greasy, hinging on a Mumbai corporate drone who rents a cheap flat in a sprawling suburban housing colony only to discover that the previous tenant was an aspiring actress whose spirit has taken up permanent residence in the spare bedroom with a penchant for throwing porcelain and speaking in exaggerated Tamil-accented Hindi that feels dangerously close to an SNL sketch from 1998. Prabhu Deva plays this hapless husband with the wide-eyed exhaustion of a man who realized halfway through the first dance rehearsal that his knees were no longer twenty-four years old, yet he still manages to inject a genuine, trembling franticness into scenes where he is arguing with empty air or being bodily thrown across a sofa by an invisible entity that apparently prefers him single.

Tamannaah Bhatia, pulling double duty as the dowdy, oil-haired village wife and the glamorous, possessed superstar phantom who hijacks her mortal frame, does something quite fascinating with the split personality without ever leaning on the crutches of standard genre tropes, though it's a small thing but it bugged me how the film insists on using the exact same four-note string sting every single time her eyes roll back into her head. It gets repetitive fast, dragging down what should have been genuinely eerie physical comedy into the realm of repetitive TV sketches, which is a real shame because her comic timing when she is trying to seduce a terrified Prabhu Deva while simultaneously wearing a cotton nightdress and a terrifying glare has a real, wicked spark that reminds you of why she remains one of the more reliable screen presences in contemporary commercial cinema.

Sonu Sood enters about forty minutes in as a mega-star named Max who looks like he wandered off the set of *Singh Is Bliing* and forgot to take his personal gym trainer with him, strutting through frame after frame with a glazed, self-satisfied grin that suggests he thinks he is starring in an entirely different movie about corporate ambition rather than a supernatural farce about a haunted apartment in suburban Chennai. His scenes with Prabhu Deva possess a weird, shambling energy that feels less like a rehearsed confrontation and more like two guys at a gym locker room trying to remember where they parked their scooters, which somehow works better than a polished, high-gloss rivalry ever could because it grounds the absurd supernatural mechanics in actual, recognizable male exhaustion.

Alagappan shoots the musical numbers with the frantic, handheld enthusiasm of someone who watched too many MTV countdowns in the late nineties and decided that editing on every single downbeat was a legitimate substitute for staging a narrative, resulting in dance sequences that feel less like choreography and more like visual aspirin. The title track, which became a minor viral earworm before the film even hit theatres, is deployed no less than four times in the first hour, sometimes as a ringtone, sometimes as a background score, sometimes as a full-blown fantasy sequence where the background dancers appear to have been recruited from a local Zumba class ten minutes prior to rolling camera, creating a weird, hypnotic drone that numbs the brain long before the climax rolls around.

There is an entire subgenre of supernatural comedies in Hindi films that treats ghosts not as figures of terror or even sorrow, but as mildly annoying landlords who refuse to pay their utility bills, and this movie fits squarely into that tradition without offering much in the way of structural reinvention, feeling closer in spirit to mid-period Priyadarshan than anything genuinely daring or strange. The script is content to coast on old gags involving mistaken identities, locked doors, and furious landlords who look at the camera with exasperation, which means that whenever the narrative threatens to dip into actual emotional territory regarding the dead actress's unfulfilled ambitions, it promptly panics and throws another dance number at the problem.

The cinematography by Manikandan switches wildly between slick, neon-drenched hotel lobbies that look like they were lit by an enthusiastic architecture student and grainy, over-exposed domestic interiors where you can practically see the boom mic shadow dancing across the wallpaper, giving the whole enterprise an erratic, restless texture that mirrors its protagonist's fraying sanity. It's a messy, disjointed thing that never quite figures out whether it wants to be a broad satire of the regional film industry or a sweet-natured ghost story about forgotten starlets, and that lack of tonal clarity is precisely why it eventually exhausts you instead of entertaining you.

Prabhu Deva’s face in the final twenty minutes, as he has to perform a complex, emotionally fraught dance routine while simultaneously pretending to be possessed by two different spirits and a very confused local film producer, is a masterclass in professional endurance if nothing else, proving that even when the material is aggressively thin and the jokes have the shelf life of sliced bread left on a radiator, a genuine physical comedian can still squeeze a few drops of honest laughter out of a thoroughly dry well, even if you will likely forget you watched the whole thing by the time you reach the parking lot.