Udita Jhunjhunwala

In 2007, Priyadarshan directed Vidya Balan as the ghostly apparition Manjulika in Bhool Bhulaiyaa, with Aneez Bazmee taking over the reins of this comedy-horror franchise in 2022. Akshay Kumar was replaced by Kartik Aaryan, who played Ruhaan—a charlatan masquerading as a psychic, who communicates with and channels spirits. Tabu stepped into the dual roles of the trapped spirit, Manjulika, and her twin sister, Anjulika.

In the first season of the ZEE5 series Mithya, Hindi professor Juhi Adhikari (Huma Qureshi) was locked in a dangerous battle with student Rhea Rajguru (Avantika Dassani) after she failed her the young woman for plagiarism and branded her a cheat. The entitled daughter of a tea estate owner and college trustee, Rhea became obsessed with seeking vengeance, sometimes with violent results.

The year is 1997. The setting is Rishikesh. It’s a time just before mobile phones, when DVDs were still predominant. Writer-director Raaj Shaandilyaa’s film opens with a shoddily executed computer graphic of a train hurtling towards a forlorn man on the tracks. This is the eponymous Vicky, played by Rajkummar Rao. It’s much like Rao’s year which has been speeding along strongly, but will eventually have to come to a halt. Unfortunately, the Rao train has been derailed by this most unintelligible 152-minute-long romantic comedy that is built around a slim plot line.

Sector 36, based on the gruesome murders of Nithari village in Noida, which were uncovered in 2007, follows a serial killer who lives in plain sight. In Aditya Nimbalkar’s crime drama, Prem (Vikrant Massey) is the house-help of Balbir Bassi (Akash Khurana), an affluent businessman from Karnal. Bassi rarely visits his palatial bungalow in Delhi’s Sector 36, but when he does, his actions are also creepy. Prem, taking advantage of his unsupervised existence, far from his own family that lives in a village, abducts children from the neighbouring migrant settlement, mercilessly killing them to satisfy his deviant appetite.