Sneha Jaiswal (Twitter | Instagram)
Kya tha yeh? Kyu tha yeh?
*Translation: What was this? Why was this?
I mean I know we’ve loved Bollywood horror-comedies like ‘Stree’, ‘Stree 2’, ‘Bhediya’, ‘Munjya’ and even ‘Phone Bhoot’ (yep, I thought it was pretty fun)… the official trailer for ‘The Bhootni’ looks quite bad. Despite an interesting star cast.
It’s got Sanjay Dutt, Mouni Roy, Sunny Singh, Palak Tiwari, Aasif Khan, and a bunch of others… but you know what the plot is all about? A virgin tree. That’s their idea of comedy: a ghost haunting a tree called virgin tree, targeting only virgin boys. Fine. Ha Ha Ha. Not.
Mouni Roy plays The Bhootni called Mohabbat, who died with some unfulfilled desires, so she haunts young men at the college where the fabled virgin tree is. Sanjay Dutt plays a Ghostbuster Baba who can exorcise spirits and demons. And for some reason, he travels with big guns. Since when do spirits need bullets? Sunny Singh and Palak Tiwari play college students, while Sunny Singh’s character is chased by the bhootni.
The less-than-three-minute trailer offers no funny jokes, garish CGI, and the tired Karan Johar formula (or Marvel if you like) of making meta jokes. So there’s a sequence where someone moves like a snake-charmer in front of Mouni’s Mohabbat, and she screams, “Main naagin nahi hoon!” (She played the titular shape-shifting serpent in the TV show Naagin). And the special effects are an eye-sore, my eyes are burning with tears of regret. I didn’t even know if I wanted to write about this trailer, because that indicates admission of having watched a video that shouldn’t have come up in my YouTube feed.
From the looks of it, ‘The Bhootni’ is definitely not going to be a spooky movie, and if the jokes in the trailer are to go by, it doesn’t look very comedic either! But okay, who knows, maybe the cast will spring a surprise when ‘The Bhootni’ hits theaters on 18th April 2025.
Watch the trailer on YouTube, it’s also embedded below.