2 Stars (out of 4)
The horror-comedy The Bhootnii (“The Ghostess“) is neither scary nor funny. It’s not entertaining enough to spark delight nor offensive enough to spark outrage. It exists.
Writer-director Sidhaant Sachdev’s story takes place on the campus of fictional St. Vincent’s College in Delhi as a convenient means of sequestering the characters to just a few locations. There’s a school legend that involves praying to the campus’s “Virgin Tree.” I’m not sure if the praying humans are the virgins or the tree is a virgin, or how one would even determine that.
Every year, students hold a festival on Valentine’s Day in hopes that prayers to the Virgin Tree will grant them true love. The tradition continues despite a terrible fire that destroyed the festival in 2003, but several suspicious deaths in the years since have birthed rumors that a ghost haunts the festival.
The night before Valentine’s Day in 2025, the woman that Shantanu (Sunny Singh) is smitten with ditches him for another man. Desperate and drunk, Shantanu begs the tree for true love. The next day, his bubbly friend Ananya (Palak Tiwari) returns from a 6-month study abroad program. Shantanu and his superstitious roommates Nasir (Aasif Khan) and Sahil (Nikunj Lotia) are suspicious of Ananya’s return, but their worries are misplaced. Ananya is not a ghost.
But Mohabbat (Mouni Roy) is — and she’s got her sights on Shantanu. She’s a spirit attached to the tree Shantanu drunkenly prayed to, and she’s here to fulfill his wish. Her name even means “love.”
Shantanu quickly falls for the beautiful ghost that only he can see. But Mohabbat isn’t taking chances, and she afflicts anyone who might interfere with her plans with seizures. The outbreak prompts the dean of the college to call in a former student for help: parapsychologist Krishna (Sanjay Dutt), who goes by the nickname “Baba,” because he earned two B.A. degrees.
To be clear, Baba isn’t an exorcist. He’s a man of science, and he’s found a way to use science to help him punch ghosts. 65-year-old Dutt’s action sequences are aided by some barely disguised harness work that is inadvertently funny, but the fight scenes are otherwise forgettable.
That’s the thing about The Bhootnii — there isn’t much memorable about it. Stuff happens in a mostly logical order, characters act more or less as expected. The funny bits fall flat, the dance sequences are forgettable. The acting is merely serviceable.
Mouni Roy is the exception. She showed her skill at playing a compelling villain in Brahmāstra, and she is even more effective at giving Mohabbat real depth. It would be a shame to see Roy pigeonholed into playing negative characters, but she’s better at it than most.
Still, Roy’s presence in the film is part of The Bhootnii‘s most distracting issue: casting. [This part of my review may count as a spoiler, so stop now if you’re planning to watch the film.]
Among the “present day” cast, only one actor — 24-year-old Tiwari, who looks much younger than her fellow performers — is anywhere close in age to an actual living-in-a-campus-dorm, full-time college student. Singh is 39, and Khan and Lotia are in their mid-30s as well. Mohabbat was a student when she died, but Roy is also 39. Baba attended the college in 2003, at which time Dutt would have been 43. If you’re not going to cast actors anywhere close to college-age, then don’t set the story on a campus.
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