Review: 'The Bhootnii'- No laughs, no screams, just regrets!

When it comes to Bollywood, originality is as elusive as a good horror-comedy. And The Bhootnii is the latest example of this unfortunate trend. It’s not just a bad movie, it’s the kind of cinematic disaster that makes you question everything: the genre, the makers, and your own decision to watch it. How this script got greenlit is a bigger mystery than the so-called haunted Virgin Tree it revolves around.

Let’s start with the plot, if you can call it that. Set in St Vincent College of Arts and Culture (which looks more like a neon-lit fashion runway than a place of learning), the film follows Shantanu (Sunny Singh) and his two friends Sahil and Naseer, who are more obsessed with finding love than passing exams. Their favorite hangout spot? A mysterious Virgin Tree that’s supposed to grant romantic wishes. Yep, that's the movie’s big idea. After getting dumped, Shantanu decides to beg the tree for “true love.” What follows is a tangled mess of spirits, love triangles, lame jokes, seizures, and college kids dying randomly.

Enter Mohabbat (Mouni Roy), the ghost of the hour, who wakes up every Valentine’s Day looking for love and leaves behind a trail of hallucinations and death. As students start dropping like flies, the college calls upon Sanjay Dutt’s Baba Krishna Tripathi, a bizarre para-physicist with salt guns, iron rods, and yes a bazooka. This character feels like he accidentally wandered in from an action film being shot next door.

The screenplay is an exhausting mix of forced jokes, outdated tropes, and cringe-worthy dialogue that feels like it was written by someone binge-watching TikTok trends. Instead of blending horror and comedy, it fails miserably at both. Jump scares that don’t scare. Jokes that don’t land. Emotional scenes that make you laugh out of secondhand embarrassment. The film spends over two hours building up to a climax that feels like your punishment for not walking out during the interval.

Sunny Singh as Shantanu is painfully dull. His expressions are limited to “slightly confused” and “mildly uninterested.” Any spark of charm he once had in previous films is completely missing here. His chemistry with Palak Tiwari’s Ananya is so flat, it makes you wish Mohabbat would possess them just to stir up some emotion.

Palak, despite her stunning screen presence, is given a paper-thin character. Her role exists just to look pretty and cry at the right time. She shows promise, but this film is not the right platform for her to shine. She deserves better, and honestly, so do we.

Mouni Roy plays Mohabbat like she’s still stuck in her Naagin days, with dramatic eyes and wild hair flips. But the make-up, VFX, and costume design are so bad, it becomes hard to take her seriously. Her transformation into a vengeful spirit with glowing green veins is unintentionally funny. The film wants you to fear her, but you end up feeling sorry for her instead.

Then comes Sanjay Dutt, a legendary actor reduced to a walking parody. His Baba character is a strange mash-up of ghostbuster, guru, and retired action hero. While he tries to bring some energy to the role, the script gives him nothing to work with. Not even his trademark swag can save him from the chaos around him.

The VFX is so poorly done, it makes a high-school YouTube horror skit look like Avatar. Flying spirits, glowing eyes, cheesy lighting. And the less said about the aerial shots and green-screen backdrops, the better.

That said, not everything is a complete trainwreck. Aasif Khan as Naseer brings a few genuinely funny moments, with his poetic one-liners and subtle comic timing. He’s probably the only actor who seems to understand the tone of the film and works with it, instead of against it. His performance is a small saving grace in an otherwise dreary experience.

Another accidental “highlight”? The Virgin Tree. Yes, the actual tree. It somehow manages to steal more attention than any of the human characters. It gets an entire song, multiple monologues, and enough camera time to suggest it was secretly the real star of the movie.

In conclusion, The Bhootnii is a loud, confused, and unnecessary addition to Bollywood’s already questionable horror-comedy lineup. It wastes its talented cast, has no sense of pacing or genre, and turns a potentially fun premise into a cringe-inducing ordeal.

Final Verdict: 1.5 out of 5 stars.