‘Bhooth Bangla’ review: Priyadarshan’s noisy slapstick feels stale

At 174 minutes, Priyadarshan’s Bhooth Bangla arrives weighed down by both its runtime and its ambitions. The film, with a screenplay by Priyadarshan, Rohan Shankar and Abilash Nair and story by Aakash Kaushik, attempts to revive the director’s signature blend of slapstick comedy and supernatural intrigue. What it delivers instead is a sprawling, uneven narrative that depends heavily on nostalgia while offering little that feels fresh.

Set in Mangalpur, a fictitious town near Lucknow where newlywed brides are mysteriously disappearing, the film opens with multiple story threads unfolding in quick succession. In one, Dushund Acharya’s death leaves behind a fortune for London-based Meera (Mithila Palkar). Her debt-ridden brother Arjun (Akshay Kumar) immediately flies off to India to explore the palatial home. Their father, Vasudev Acharya (Jisshu Sengupta), has departed for Sydney and remains frustratingly unreachable just as the circumstances of the inheritance confuse Meera and Arjun.

Arjun travels to Mangalpur to claim the estate, which includes a large, uninhabited haveli. Here, the film introduces a thieving caretaker (Asrani), who provides the obligatory warnings about hauntings and doomed weddings. But Arjun is undeterred and hands over Meera’s wedding preparations to a planner (Paresh Rawal) who arrives with his team, including a meek electrician named Balli (Rajpal Yadav). Arjun takes an instant dislike to Balli.

From here, Bhooth Bangla barrels into noisy slapstick and loosely stitched supernatural set-ups. Between Rawal, Kumar, Yadav and Asrani, there is relentless shouting, slapping and broad physical comedy, often tipping into crass humour. Kumar is clearly in his element, his comic timing driving much of the chaos, with Rawal gamely keeping pace as a perpetually afflicted wedding planner. Yadav, meanwhile, is reduced to a punching bag -- slapped, abused, possessed, misunderstood, and sometimes all of the above.

The film’s female characters are given little to do. Tabu, as Arjun and Meera’s mother Yashoda, is almost entirely wasted in a role that raises the question of why she agreed to it. Wamiqa Gabbi’s Priya, who arrives searching for her missing sister, is similarly forgettable, emblematic of how the film sidelines its women.

For nearly an hour, the film cycles through repetitive scenes establishing hauntings, such as bat-like apparitions, ghostly presences, possessions and superstition, without meaningfully advancing the plot. By the time the interval arrives, the story has barely progressed.

The tonal references are familiar, evoking everything from Indiana Jones to Bhool Bhulaiyya and Shaitaan, but without coherence. The narrative coherence doesn’t fare much better, for example when Arjun finally reaches his father on the phone (this is a time when the world was transitioning from rotary phones to cellular phones) at a critical juncture, the latter offers no concrete help, instead redirecting him to yet another mystic for guidance. And the supposed twists are largely predictable.

Technical aspects also stumble. Divakar Mani’s cinematography and M.S. Aiyappan Nair’s editing contribute to the film’s slackness, and Pritam’s music is entirely expendable.

The film’s internal rules are equally inconsistent. A demon that supposedly evaporates in light appears unaffected in a climax set in a cave illuminated by torches and ritual fire. Such convenient contrivances further erode any tension the film attempts to build.

Bhooth Bangla, which could just as well be titled Bhool Bhulaiyya 4, works better as a comedy than as a horror film, repeating ideas without adding much. Priyadarshan’s familiar tropes, including double roles, slapstick violence, sexual innuendo and a disregard for logic, are all present, assembled into a screenplay that feels uneven and recycled rather than original and updated.