‘The Bhootnii’ Movie Review: A Horror-Comedy That Haunts its Viewers 

Director: Sidhaant Sachdev
Writers: Sidhaant Sachdev, Vankush Arora
Cast: Sunny Singh, Sanjay Dutt, Mouni Roy, Palak Tiwari, Aasif Khan, Nick
Language: Hindi

As a genre, the horror comedy has reached a stage in its afterlife cycle where its ghoulish spirit is haunting theatres and vowing revenge against empty seats. The latest distorted entity is called The Bhootnii, an anti-film posing as a campus comedy set in a university that merges shots of Mumbai’s St. Xavier’s College with the abandoned studio lot of Om Shanti Om (2007) and the miscellaneous cultural energy of Rok Sako To Rok Lo (2004). It stars Mouni Roy as a jilted ghost named Mohabbat who yearns for the love of the student who accidentally summons her after a bad breakup by yelling “Where is my mohabbat?” in front of a tree haunted by her. He wanted to scream at the Virgin Tree (don’t ask), but drunkenly reached the wrong yard on a rainy night. Sometimes I wonder if I’m actually typing these lines in 2025.

For much of its 130 incoherent minutes, The Bhootnii unfolds like a practical joke on anyone who can say the title without instinctively adding a “ke” after it. I woke up at the crack of dawn for my passport-renewal appointment, so there were times during the screening where I felt like I was either asleep, hungover or hallucinating. Or all at once. There are early POV shots of the ghost lurking around, and the hair (is that a fringe?) over the camera often resembles charred pasta strands. There are #SingleLivesMatter posters in hostel rooms of St. Vincent’s College of Arts and Culture that look like the rooms from Mohabbatein’s all-boys boarding school (but only if Gurukul were called St. Mohabbat’s College of Love). Sanjay Dutt appears as Baba Krishna Tripathi, the world’s ‘leading para-physicist’ who combines religion and science to vanquish demons, zombies, poltergeists and frozen vampires (?). He quotes from the Gita while using ghost-busting guns and machines. His intro montage has the kind of CGI that died with the 8-bit video-games from the late 1980s. Tripathi is there but he’s also not there, raising suspicions about what characters are real, or whether the film itself is real.

There’s a hero, Shantanu (Sunny Singh), who always acts like his brain is in buffering mode. There are his two best friends: horny Sahil (a devotee of eve-teasing) and soulful Nasir (who obviously starts every sentence with “miya,” and is jokingly called ‘Mughlai’ and variations of Mirza Ghalib). Shantanu’s human girlfriend (sorry for the paranormal racism) is Ananya (Palak Tiwari), a mournful student who spends her days among plants in a designer nursery and getting possessed in her spare time. She professes her love to Shantanu as youngsters do: during a loud rant about the convenience of their friendship. There are addas of food and lassi and alcohol and fairy lights everywhere, and there is a history of male suicides on Valentine’s Day over the last two decades. And there’s a tragically unoriginal backstory of a girl, her sleazy boyfriend and a viral sex tape that still does not explain the allure of a needy ghost on premises where student protests involve placards saying “this is a Bhootiya college”.

The gimmick is that only Shantanu can see Mohabbat, she’s very clingy, and others think he’s ‘delulu’ — a metaphor for the viewer’s relationship with the movie they’re watching. She also disappears between 3 to 8 PM every day, a happy-hours ghost of sorts. Men will be men, so Shantanu manages to date both of them together: Ananya between 3 to 8, and Mohabbat for the rest of his waking hours. A spiritual love triangle or just para-amorous kids? At one point, Mohabbat is so determined to spend some alone time with her man that she yanks him into the sky and they flirt while sitting on a cloud (not called Cloud 9) at night. His friends watch from below with a telescope. They’re also simultaneously on a Whatsapp group with Baba, who takes ages to type “hi”. Sometimes I wonder if I’m actually typing on this Whatsapp group in 2025. Things could be worse, I suppose. Imagine if my passport appointment was after the screening. That’s the plot of a modern horror comedy: a passport-sized photo with glazed eyes, an accidental fringe, and burnt noodles pretending to be my hair.