The Bhootnii

Within a few minutes of the film’s opening, I asked myself: what am I doing here? Two hours, ten minutes, and what seems like a lifetime of groaning-and-moaning later, I have zero answers to that one. Horror comedies may be the flavour of the season after the ‘Stree’ jamboree, but even its part 2 was nowhere close to the delightful original. In this new film, we get a ‘The’, emphasising that this is not your random garden variety of bhootni, but a very specific one, with a double i to boot. Ergo, this one will stand apart. Which it does. It proudly and flagrantly stands apart from any vestiges of plot and production values, forget about sense and sensibility.

What’s the deal with Sunny Singh? The actor, in his fairly long career, has been a curious nonentity in Hindi cinema, turning up in any and every film that will have him. He was a mildly amusing presence in the Luv Ranjan Cinematic Universe. But his recent output has been especially bleak. It does not seem to matter if he is playing Lakshmana in Adipurush or a boozy beefcake in Wild Wild Punjab. Whatever the assignment, Singh gives the impression of an amiable jock who’s wandered in from the nearest Hakim’s Aalim. In The Bhootnii, a new horror-comedy, Singh plays Santanu, a student of ‘St. Vincent’s College of Arts and Culture’, a true cradle of learning. Its students occupy themselves with the pursuit of sachi mohabbat (true love), which is understandably hard to come by. Each year, on Valentine’s Day, they hang trinkets and pictures on a wishing tree called the ‘Virgin Tree’. It is worshipped as a bringer of romantic good luck, but it also bodes ill: a tree nymph, played by Mouni Roy, haunts the campus, and has apparently precipitated a string of recent suicides.

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.

Once in a while, a film comes that breaks even the toughest of the tough. That, when watching, you do not question your existence but the fact that you are still alive. That scoffs at a regular cinephile and vows to teach them a lesson for still wanting to watch Hindi films. Once in a while, a film makes sitting through it an art form and filmmaking into a joke. This year, it is Sidhaant Sachdev’s The Bhootnii. The ’the’ in the title is the only, and the last, semblance of respect the filmmaker offers to anybody associated with the film – actors and audience alike. Everything beyond this unfolds as an assault to the senses and disrespect to the fact of living and the art of surviving. Rage should have made me more coherent, but Sachdev’s film has broken me. If it were a living entity, it would be sitting across and, seeing my lifeless stare into the laptop, celebrating my defeat.