At first glance, Priyadarshan’s Bhooth Bangla seems cursed to be more of the same as yet another templated haunted-haveli horror-comedy. Perhaps there is hope, you tell yourself. Perhaps Priyadarshan reuniting with Akshay Kumar after over a decade could mean something. Perhaps this could be the sequel to Bhool Bhulaiya they never got to make, considering Anees Bazmee and Kartik Aaryan took over the franchise in 2022.
But, alas, what we get is a nothingburger of the highest order: a horror-comedy that doesn't land as horror, comedy, or even as a vaguely passable time at the movies.
Meet Arjun Acharya (an overexcited Akshay Kumar). While trying to organise the wedding of his younger sister Meera (Mithila Palkar), the siblings learn that they've just inherited a sprawling palace after the demise of the grandfather they never knew.
The pair’s father is played by Jisshu Sengupta.
I would've loved to have been in the room when they told Sengupta that he'd be playing Akshay Kumar's father, despite being almost a decade younger than him.
Anyway, Arjun travels to Mangalpur to his recently inherited haveli to make arrangements for his sister's wedding. Except, of course, it’s haunted. Of course, something's not right in the local village. A strange bat-like demon called Vadhusur has been abducting women for years. A literal... Batman (please send help).
Defeatingly Dated
A Google search tells me the budget of Bhooth Bangla is Rs 120 crore. You can see almost none of that on screen. Priyadarshan's defeatingly dated film looks, sounds, and feels like it belongs to a decade ago, if not more. It's shoddily shot, the dubbing is on its own trip, and the editing ensures that scenes don't end as much as they whimper away, and fizzle out.
The score is intermittent and seems to forget it exists. We get odd, long stretches of silence, which feel strange for a film with such an animated tonality.
Even the central bat creature is essentially some dude in a costume and some make-up. They didn't even have the decency or care to give us a big CGI blur of a baddie. In short, the "production value"—as the kids call it—is a mess.
If the film looks cheap, the jokes are even cheaper. The "twang" humour on offer here ranges from characters slapping each other as punchlines.
Or Paresh Rawal (he plays the wedding planner, not that it matters) getting his ass set on fire multiple times. Or Rajpal Yadav (he plays an electrician, not that it matters), being made to look like he's slapping a woman's backside with a chappal, or staring down her low-cut blouse. Or hammers falling on people's heads. Or Akshay Kumar getting his foot stuck in a bucket.
In short, the laughs are rare and reluctant, and the frights are few.
The Laughs Are Rare, The Frights Are Few
The close-to-three-hour narrative is lifeless, pun not intended. There's barely enough plot to justify the painful duration.
At the very least, you can always count on these films to give us a colourful, overstuffed ensemble to keep things dynamic and moving. A facial expression here, a gag there. But here, we don't even get that.
Much of the first half is Paresh Rawal, Akshay Kumar, and Rajpal Yadav doing the most and barking at each other till their blood vessels erupt (it's not nearly as fun as it sounds), with Asrani stepping in intermittently.
Post-interval, we get long stretches of a lone Kumar fighting away the lazily crafted bat creature around the mansion.
As for the plot, I couldn't explain it to you if I tried.
A spunky Wamika Gabbi stops by for two scenes and a song. A lengthy, uninteresting flashback scene features a Tabu cameo—and shows Akshay Kumar looking like Mangal Pandey for some reason. There are cursed fathers and sons, deals with the devil, ritual killings (I think), and random twins. There's even a manic pixie dream ghost.
The very act of making a horror-comedy in 2026 suggests laziness and indifference. It’s jumping on a trend bandwagon to make a return.
Even relative to that scale, and how forgiving we are to “slapstick comedies” such as this, Bhooth Bangla is an empty slog to sit through. The only thing haunting here is the tragedy of the minimal effort and care given to mounting an even vaguely passable time at the movies. The joke is on us.
Bhooth Bangla releases in theatres on April 17.
(Suchin Mehrotra is a critic and film journalist who covers Indian cinema for a range of publications. He's also the host of The Streaming Show podcast on his own YouTube channel. This is an opinion piece, and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)