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Movie Review: The Bhootnii (2025)

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2 Stars (out of 4)

Watch The Bhootnii on ZEE5

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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Movie Review: Wild Wild Punjab (2024)

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2 Stars (out of 4)

Watch Wild Wild Punjab on Netflix

TV director Simarpreet Singh makes the jump to features with the Netflix Original film Wild Wild Punjab, a road trip comedy written and produced by Luv Ranjan.

Office drone Khanna (Varun Sharma) caught his co-worker girlfriend Vaishali cheating on him with their boss, and now the new couple is getting married.

Distraught Khanna wants to end his life, but his womanizing friend Maan (Sunny Singh) has a better idea. Maan says that, while Vaishali thinks she’s traded up, if Khanna tells her that he’s over her, it’ll make her question whether she’s with the right guy.

Their friend Honey (Manjot Singh) agrees, but he thinks it’ll be most effective if Khanna tells Vaishali “I am over you” in person. Festivities are underway for her wedding in Pathankot, which is only a three hour drive from Patiala. Honey offers to drive them there in his souped-up truck.

The only friend with reservations is cowardly Jain (Jassie Gill), but that’s just because he’s terrified of his overbearing dad. Jain’s own arranged marriage is scheduled for next week, so he’s already got plenty to worry about. Still, the guys convince Jain to lie to his dad and join them since they’ll be back from Patiala by morning. What could go wrong?

Before they’ve even left town, the guys crash a wedding to get free food and drinks. When they wake up hungover the next morning at a stranger’s house, Jain discovers he’s married to the woman whose wedding they crashed. And they’re still hours away from Pathankot.

As immature as the friends are, they’re actually decent guys. Their plan isn’t borne out of vindictiveness, but out of concern for Khanna’s well-being. Taking him to his ex’s wedding to tell her he’s moved on isn’t that disruptive, and it will give him back a sense of control.

After some initial reluctance, they even welcome Jain’s accidental bride Radha (Patralekhaa) into the group. She suggests that Khanna’s declaration will be more believable if he’s accompanied by a new woman, and they head to a nearby college to find one. That’s how feisty Meera (Ishita Raj) joins the crew.

When the story focuses on the characters, it’s pretty entertaining. It helps that the acting is uniformly good, with Manjot Singh and Patralekhaa standing out among the rest. Counterintuitively, the story drags during the action scenes in the second half, when the group engages in multiple car chases and a shootout with drug dealers. Drugs and guns feel like perfunctory signifiers that the movie is set in Punjab, as if without those tropes the movie would lack a sense of place.

Simarpreet Singh’s direction is overall good, and the screenplay — co-written by Ranjan, Sandeep Jain, and Harman Wadala — is decent. But Wild Wild Punjab is a misleading title for a movie so conventional.

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Movie Review: Luv Ki Arrange Marriage (2024)

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1 Star (out of 4)

Watch Luv Ki Arrange Marriage on Zee5

Luv Ki Arrange Marriage (“Luv’s Arranged Marriage“) is a romantic comedy that has little to offer in the way of either romance or comedy.

The titular Luv (Sunny Singh) is the thuggish son of Prem Kumar (Annu Kapoor), a widowed Lothario with a reputation in their apartment colony. Luv chides his dad that a 55-year-old man shouldn’t be such a flirt, which is unintentionally funny since 55 isn’t exactly ancient and Kapoor is actually 68, anyway.

Father and son head to Bhopal with Luv’s aunt Prema (Kapoor in drag) and her husband Mishra (Mushtaq Khan) to meet a prospective bride for Luv named Ishika (Avneet Kaur). Ishika has rejected almost two dozen grooms so far, and she does the same with Luv. Both families say some hurtful things, and the Kumars leave in a huff.

Their exit is stymied as the city is engulfed in fiery political protests. With nowhere to go and a curfew in place, the Kumars return to Ishika’s spacious house and stay with her family for several days. Feelings between Luv and Ishika soften when he realizes that she’s avoiding marriage simply because she doesn’t want to abandon her widowed mother Supriya (Supriya Pathak).

Before Luv and Ishika can tell everyone they’ve reconsidered their engagement, Prem and Supriya announce their plans to marry. Instead of becoming husband and wife, Luv and Ishika are about to become brother and sister.

The film has a classic comedy premise, but there’s nothing fresh about the presentation. Flat jokes are delivered at maximum volume, and scenes are underscored with corny music and dated sound effects. Even with a relatively short two-hour runtime, the film devotes too much time to side characters like Rajpal Yadav’s spurned suitor Pyare and Paritosh Tripathi’s thief Jugnu.

It’s odd that Luv is the focal point of the title and the plot when he’s the least interesting character. The centering of his feelings is undeserved, especially when it comes at the expense of other characters. For example, when Luv does something selfish and Ishika gives him consequences, he gets a sad song montage about how deceitful Ishika is.

Singh’s low-energy performance does Luv no favors, though he’s more lively in the film’s dance numbers. Kaur puts in a solid effort as Ishika, and Pathak makes Supriya into a sympathetic figure. Kapoor and Yadav are comedy veterans and bring energy to their roles, but that’s not enough to recommend Luv Ki Arrange Marriage.

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Movie Review: Adipurush (2023)

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1 Star (out of 4)

This is a review of the Hindi version of Adipurush streaming on Netflix.

Adipurush reaches for the stars and falls well short, resulting in a film that looks bad and feels slow.

I acknowledge that I am not the target audience for Adipurush. The film opens with an onscreen note explaining that it is a devotional work, with the Hindu faithful as the presumptive audience for this retelling of a portion of the epic Ramayana. I’m familiar with the tale of Sita’s abduction by Ravana and her rescue by Rama, but the version presented in Adipurush is told somewhat out of sequence, with the assumption that everyone watching already knows all the details about this story, as well as Hindu cosmology more generally. Also, all of the characters go by aliases in the film.

That said, my issues with Adipurush have to do with the film’s execution, and not a misunderstanding of the material.

Prabhas plays Raghava, a prince who lives in the jungle in exile with his wife Janaki (Kriti Sanon) and his brother Shesh (Sunny Singh). The demoness Shurpanakha (Tejaswini Pandit) is enamored of Raghava, but he spurns her. She returns to the kingdom of Lanka and convinces her brother Lankesh (Saif Ali Khan) — king of the demons and a giant with many heads — to kidnap Janaki. Lankesh succeeds through trickery, forcing Raghava to seek aid from a race of forest-dwelling ape-men called the Vanara in order to get Janaki back.

Stylistically, Adipurush is a mashup of Lord of the Rings, Baahubali, and the recent Planet of the Apes trilogy. Lanka and its castle look like Sauron’s fortress in Mordor, complete with trolls manning the gates. Fanciful elements like a swan boat call back to Baahubali. The Vanara look like they could be Caesar’s long-lost cousins.

But Adipurush doesn’t come close to matching the quality of the movies that serve as its inspiration. Writer-director Om Raut tries to execute his vision on such a grand scale that the visual effects can’t keep up. Instead of having dozens of creepy bats or specters that look cool, he opts for hundreds of bats and specters that look bad. Rather than ask his VFX team to animate hundreds of ape warriors with enough texture to look believable, he has them animate tens of thousands that look like low-budget cartoons.

The onscreen human actors don’t feel as though they are operating within a real physical environment, and practical effects are rarely used. There’s some kind of filter or post-production treatment done to Prabhas’s face that makes him look like a cartoon. It’s distracting because none of the other human actors are given such treatment (though it would be hard to tell with Shesh because Singh uses only one facial expression throughout the entire film).

Visual shortcomings might be overlooked if the story was told at a fast pace, but Raut loves slow motion. The characters often move in slow motion, giving the audience plenty of time to linger on the subpar visuals while being bored stiff. This pacing hinders what Prabhas can do with his performance. Same goes for Sanon, to a lesser degree. She does get a few good scenes with Khan, who takes advantage of the chance to play a larger-than-life villain and seems to enjoy himself.

Given that Adipurush presently ranks as one of the most expensive Indian movies of all time, the quality of the finished product is underwhelming. In order to execute his vision given whatever constraints he was working under, Raut would have been more successful making an animated movie. Better that than a live-action film that looks cartoonish.

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Movie Review: Pyaar Ka Punchnama 2 (2015)

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PyaarKaPunchnama2Zero Stars (out of 4)

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Calling Pyaar Ka Punchnama 2 (“Postmortem of Love 2“) a comedy is false advertising. It’s impossible for a movie so hateful to be funny.

Three bros — Gogo (Karthik Aaryan), Sid (Sunny Singh), and Thakur (Omkar Kapoor) — find life in their carefree bachelor pad turned upside down by the apparent source of all evil: sexy women. Faced with female sexiness, the men become unthinking automatons, doing whatever the women say, at the expense of their own happiness.

The budding romances proceed through the same gender clichés that were tired back in the 1980s: women love shopping; they don’t like sports; they have nosy friends. Presumably the scene of several women going to the restroom together was left on the cutting room floor.

Gogo’s girlfriend, Chiku (Nushrat Barucha), is a walking stereotype. She schools a disinterested Gogo on the various shades of pink, and she talks during a televised cricket match. Sid’s girlfriend, Supriya (Sonalli Sehgall), isn’t any more modern, fearing to tell her traditional parents about their relationship.

Writer-director Luv Ranjan doesn’t know what to make of Thakur’s girlfriend, Kusum (Ishita Raj). She portrayed variously as cheap, greedy, thrifty, and extravagant. The ultimate point is that she’s money-conscious, which is a no-no in Thakur’s free-spending world. He doesn’t know how much money he spends, and he doesn’t care.

All of the women’s flaws are revealed after only a few dates, so why do the men stay with them? The promise of sex. None of the women makes a promise so explicitly, but that’s presumably why the men to stick around, despite their misery.

The thing is, only Thakur and Kusum have sex regularly. Gogo and Sid wait around to collect on their promise for a year-and-a-half before realizing that, perhaps, their relationships aren’t worth it. These guys are complete idiots.

Further, not one of these guys is willing to take any responsibility for his part in these messy relationships. No one is holding a gun to their heads, making them date these women. It’s a choice. Yet the movie never assigns them any guilt.

To do so would mean that men can be flawed, which is not possible in Ranjan’s narrative. Women are the ones who are wrong, except for mothers –mothers who live and die for their sons’ happiness and love them unconditionally. If only these guys could have sex with their mothers…

When the guys finally decide to end their romances is when things get really nasty, and this orgy of hatefulness constitutes the whole of the film’s third act. Gogo is comparatively kind, only going so far as to trick Chiku into thinking he loves her before revealing that he’s been secretly recording her conversations to use against her.

Thakur mounts his high horse after Kusum suggests that he save some money and develop a plan before quitting his lucrative job to “start a website.” He takes her suggestion as a treasonous lack of support, ignoring the fact that his current job pays all the rent for the guys’ bachelor pad. Have fun living on the street with your bros, dumbass.

The darkest of the breakups is between Sid and Supriya, which is a shame since Sid is the only one of the three guys who isn’t nauseatingly smarmy. Supriya spends the night with Sid after confessing her intention to marry him. The next morning, her father — whom she fears — shows up at Sid’s door accompanied by the police.

At the station, Supriya’s father asserts that the guys drugged his daughter in order to keep her overnight, and Supriya doesn’t contradict him. Sid protests to a cop, “But she came of her own free will!” The cop replies, “No girl tells the truth here.”

How many times have those very phrases been used to discredit rape victims, to blame them for their own violation? How many times have Indian police turned away victims because they believed the women deserved it? Now, Ranjan uses the same language in a comedy film to give a spineless twerp a reason to finally dump a woman he was never going to be able to marry anyway. What a man!

If victim-blaming wasn’t bad enough, Ranjan makes a joke out of drunk driving. One of Chiku’s friends wants to drive after a night of partying, and Gogo doesn’t stop her for fear of jeopardizing his hypothetical chance of someday sleeping with Chiku. The next day, Chiku laughs about how lucky they were not to get in an accident, given how drunk her friend was. Thakur gets mad because Gogo never lets him drive the car, even when he’s sober.

Hilarious. Just hilarious. The lack of humanity in Pyaar Ka Punchnama 2 is stunning.

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