There is a specific kind of sound a high-end designer watch makes when it hits a marble floor, and Sunny Singh makes that exact audio-visual mistake in the first ten minutes of The Bhootnii by wearing a timepiece that clearly cost more than his character's entire ancestral estate in rural Punjab. If I'm honest, that little wardrobe oversight set the tone for an enterprise that cannot quite decide whether it wants to be a broad, cartoonish ghost farce or a mood-heavy supernatural drama, stumbling instead into a grey zone where logic goes to die of boredom. Hindi films have spent decades trying to crack the code of the horror-comedy, usually by leaning entirely on either cheap prosthetic teeth or endless iterations of people screaming in hallways, and this particular entry arrives with a surprisingly hefty budget that somehow still manages to look like it was lit by someone experimenting with a new ring light they bought on sale. Siddhant Kumar, directing from a screenplay that feels like it was punched up in the vanity van during lunch breaks, tries to juggle too many tonally disparate balls at once, dropping most of them directly onto the toes of an audience that paid good money to be either genuinely frightened or mildly amused.

The plot itself involves an ancient spirit cursed to haunt a sprawling, half-finished resort property because of some convoluted land dispute involving royal decree and romantic betrayal, though you would never know the specifics from the way the exposition is thrown at the screen like cold porridge against a wall. Sunny Singh plays the hapless developer who inherits this disaster, and he runs around the frame with a look of permanent mild confusion, resembling a substitute teacher who has just been told the fire drill is real and nobody knows where the keys are. He does not have the comedic elasticity required to pull off the frantic, wide-eyed reactions demanded by the script, frequently lagging behind the physical beats by half a second which kills the punchline before it even registers. Mouni Roy, meanwhile, plays the titular entity with a very serious commitment to cheekbone contouring and slow-motion hair flips, gliding through corridors as though she is auditioning for a perfume commercial that happens to feature occasional poltergeist activity. She has a couple of decent moments where her silent glare conveys actual menace, but those are invariably undercut by a dialogue delivery that sounds like she is reading takeout menus aloud in a sound booth.

Then Sanjay Dutt walks onto the set wearing a leather vest that has seen things, playing a ghost-busting exorcist with a penchant for herbal tea and deeply unconvincing tribal tattoos. Dutt brings an undeniable weight to proceedings that desperately need anchoring, even if he looks like he would rather be anywhere else on the planet, perhaps napping in an air-conditioned trailer or riding a heavy motorcycle through the mountains. When he is on screen, the movie briefly snaps into focus because he simply refuses to engage with the silliness around him, treating the absurd ritual scenes with the grim professionalism of a plumber fixing a backed-up drain on a public holiday. It is a performance that operates on a completely different frequency from everyone else in the cast, which creates a jarring friction whenever he shares a frame with Singh or Roy. There is a supporting actor playing a local tea vendor who is clearly dubbed by someone working in a basement studio in Andheri with a microphone from 1998, and every time he speaks his mouth movements lag behind the audio track by several frames, a small technical glitch that drove me entirely mad by the second act.

Visually, the film relies heavily on digital fog and desaturated blue grading that makes every night scene look like it was shot inside a damp refrigerator, flattening out the textures of the expensive sets until they resemble cardboard dioramas. The soundtrack leans into recycled orchestral stabs whenever a shadow moves across the wall, abusing the brass section with an enthusiasm that suggests the composer only discovered horror movie tropes the day before scoring sessions began. Bollywood movies have a long history of utilizing musical numbers to break up narrative tension, but shoving a pulsating club track into the middle of an exorcism sequence because the streaming algorithm demands a mid-film single is an artistic choice that defies polite critique. The camera work by cinematographer Kabir Lal captures the wide expanses of the estate with professional competence, yet it rarely finds an interesting angle to frame the scares, choosing instead to stick to standard medium shots that rob the supernatural encounters of any genuine claustrophobia or dread.

The themes of ancestral guilt and the commodification of sacred land bubble beneath the surface of the narrative for brief, encouraging stretches before the director loses his nerve and cuts away to another slapstick gag involving a flying broomstick or a possessed ceiling fan. It is a pity, because Indian cinema has produced some genuinely terrifying examinations of domestic trauma disguised as genre exercise, but this project treats its own mythology with a casual indifference that makes caring about the characters nearly impossible. The script wants to say something about how modern urban expansion destroys our connection to the past, yet it delivers this message via characters screaming at CGI ghosts in a mock-Tudor mansion that looks like it was shipped flat-pack from a warehouse in Gujarat. By the time the climax rolls around, featuring a chaotic battle of wills involving holy water, flashing neon lights, and a flashback that explains approximately zero of the plot holes accumulated over the previous two hours, you are left wondering who this was actually made for. It is not an outright disaster, because Sanjay Dutt has enough screen presence to keep things from completely collapsing into unwatchable chaos, but it is certainly not something you need to rearrange your weekend schedule to witness.