Sobhita Dhulipala is chewing on a piece of hard candy in the middle of a genuinely distressing domestic meltdown, and if I am honest, that little bit of texture did more for her scene than the actual dialogue.

Anthology projects usually fall apart because the joints show too clearly where one filmmaker hands the baton to the next, leaving a messy seam of mismatched tones that makes viewing feel like a chore. Dibakar Banerjee, Zoya Akhtar, Anurag Kashyap, and Karan Johar take four distinct cracks at the macabre here, resulting in a scattershot omnibus that somehow avoids feeling completely uniform despite the corporate sheen of streaming distribution. The structural ambition is obvious enough from the jump, but the execution lurches between genuinely unsettling atmospheric dread and the kind of broad, overcooked melodrama that has plagued mainstream Hindi films for decades. You get four separate attempts at making the audience jump or squirm, and while some of them land with a heavy, satisfying thud, others just fizzle out into predictable moralizing before the credits can even roll.

Dibakar Banerjee opens the anthology with a segment that feels less like a traditional ghost story and more like a feverish, dust-choked nightmare set in a depopulated town where children have developed a taste for human flesh. Sukant Goel anchors this frantic opening with wide-eyed panic, running through alleyways while a feral child giggles from a rooftop in a way that gets under your skin. The visual palette is bleached of warmth, relying on harsh noon glare and decaying concrete to sell the apocalyptic rot, though there is a weirdly aggressive color grading choice in the underground bunker scenes that makes everyone look slightly jaundiced. It is a small thing, but that persistent yellow tint bugged me every time the camera cut back to the terrified protagonist hiding under a dirty mattress.

Zoya Akhtar shifts gears completely into psychological domestic horror, focusing on a young nurse caring for an aging, bedridden woman in a sprawling, shadowed Mumbai apartment that feels cavernous and suffocating all at once. Janhvi Kapoor plays the caregiver with a fragile, hesitant energy, her voice dropping to a nervous whisper whenever the old woman starts muttering about past tragedies and lost children. The pacing here is glacial, relying heavily on lingering close-ups and creaking floorboards to build tension, which works wonderfully until a heavy-handed dream sequence spells out the subtext with neon signs. Akhtar's direction has an undeniable elegance, capturing the claustrophobia of familial obligation without needing to shout, even if the eventual twist lands with a predictable predictability that robs the final act of its intended sting.

Anurag Kashyap takes the middle slot and immediately detonates the quiet mood with a segment about a deeply troubled woman trapped in a cycle of postpartum anxiety and bizarre dietary fixations. The sound design in this portion is relentless, layering wet chewing noises over distorted nursery rhymes until you want to claw your own ears off just to get some quiet. It is messy, deeply uncomfortable, and completely unhinged in a way that recalls his earlier work in Ugly without ever quite reaching that film's bleak, unrelenting heights of human misery. The editing chops fast and hard between hallucination and reality, sometimes leaving the viewer stranded in a narrative blur that feels deliberately disorienting.

Karan Johar closes out the quartet with a glossy, high-society marital farce that treats infidelity and grief with the subtlety of a sledgehammer, though Sobhita Dhulipala tries her absolute best to inject some genuine human pulse into the absurdity. Her character navigates a suffocatingly wealthy household where the dead husband still lingers in conversation and portraiture, and her deadpan delivery of absurd lines provides the only real comedy in a segment that desperately wants to be a gothic romance. The production design looks expensive, dripping in velvet and heavy candlelight, yet it completely lacks the lived-in grit that makes Banerjee's segment feel so tactile and dangerous. It is slick, highly polished, and entirely hollow, wrapping up the whole experiment on a note of glossy indifference that feels miles away from the genuine terror promised by the title card.

Horror in mainstream commercial Indian cinema has historically struggled to find a middle ground between cheap ghost train jolts and overly moralistic fairy tales about vengeful spirits punishing wicked humans. This project tries to push past those tired old boundaries, sometimes succeeding wildly through sheer audacity of style, and other times face-planting into the very clichés it set out to subvert. The unevenness is baked right into the format, making it impossible to recommend the whole package without issuing a few heavy disclaimers about the weaker middle stretches. You sit through twenty minutes of genuinely thrilling, gnarly filmmaking, and then you immediately pivot into an over-lit soap opera about rich people crying in expensive kitchens.

When the camera tracks Sukant Goel sprinting away from those terrifying little monsters in the opening segment, you feel a jolt of pure adrenaline that none of the later directors can quite replicate. That opening rush lingers long after the credits finish rolling, making the softer, glossier finales feel even more frustrating by comparison. It is an ambitious swing that misses as often as it connects, leaving a mixed impression that feels entirely appropriate for a project where four distinct artistic egos were thrown into a room together and told to scare people.