Let’s get the obvious out of the way: Padmini Kolhapure is the reason to buy a ticket. She plays her character with a quiet, withering authority - a woman who’s been carrying the weight of the unseen for so long that it’s settled into her bones. Every glance is loaded, every muttered prayer has layers. When the film puts her in the center, it hums.
Touqeer, meanwhile, has the tougher job: being the audience’s eyes, the skeptical one, the one who asks “but why is the door opening by itself?” She’s earnest and watchable, though the script hands her a few too many standard-issue horror-girl moments - wandering into the dark, not turning on the light, you know the drill. Sharma is dependably sturdy. Rajput has charisma to spare but not nearly enough to do.
Where Jhaad Phoonk really gets interesting is in its handling of ritual itself. It doesn’t treat the prayers and the protective rites as window dressing; there’s a genuine sense that the filmmaker respects this world enough to take it seriously. The sound design does a lot of the heavy lifting - creaking wood, distant chants, silence that stretches just a beat too long. Rajan Ramgopal Verma clearly knows how to build a mood.
But knowing how to build tension isn’t the same as knowing when to release it. The film struggles with pacing, especially in the stretch after intermission, where scenes start repeating themselves in slightly different configurations. Characters explain what we already saw. The score tells us exactly when to be scared, which deflates the scares themselves. And the climax, without spoiling anything, feels like it was shot on a schedule rather than a conviction - a lot of things happen, but not much lands.
There’s also the question of what the film wants to say. It flirts with the idea that the real horror is generational trauma dressed up in incense and mantras - a genuinely good idea - but it never quite commits to the metaphor. It wants to be a possession movie and a family drama and a village mystery, and by trying to serve all three, it ends up half-serving each.
That said, for a late-October release with a title that basically announces itself as an old-school occult thriller, it delivers enough chills to justify the trip. The cinematography is genuinely handsome - those dusty courtyards and narrow alleys look lived-in and dangerous. And any horror fan will find at least two or three sequences that get under the skin.
