Raaz Reboot Movie Review.

STORY: Happily married couple – Rihaan (Gaurav) and Shaina (Kriti) move into a heritage hotel like property in Romania and call it their home. Trouble beckons as the wife starts feeling the existence of an evil entity in their haunted house.

REVIEW: Her deadpan banker hubby refuses to believe her, while her ex beau Aditya (Emraan Hashmi) acts supportive. He also hints that the demonic spirit seeks revenge from Rihaan and not her. What’s the big Raaz that the husband’s been hiding from his wife?

The film opens with the lead, Rehaan (Gaurav Arora) mulling over his life. “Secrets are the enemy of love.” He reflects on when he moved in with his wife Shaina (Kriti Kharbanda) into a spooky house in Romania. For some unexplained reason, he’s withdrawn and shrinks at the thought of intimacy. To avoid her advances, they don’t even share the same bedroom. Later, a presence peeps out of the washbasin and from under Shaina’s bed and soon, she’s possessed. This isn’t a friendly spook, a blind ghostbuster with ESP notes in his diagnosis, “Shaina ke body ko jo spirit control kar rahi hai… It’s a terrible spirit.” And he’s a man who doesn’t mince his words. “Iss ghar mein kuch hain… a ghost,” is his first sensory perception. He’s also a subject-matter expert. While plotting the master plan to nab the aatma, he begins with, “It was important to meet outside the house as the evil has strong ears.”

The film also features Aaditya (Emraan Hashmi), a fashion photographer and Shaina’s ex-husband. A flashback shows him doing lines of Colombian talc and abusing Shaina, in that order. Elaborating any more would give away the raaz and also be a criminal waste of print space. So let’s move on to the priceless scenes. The best example of evil incarnation is where Shaina is overcome by the ‘force’ while shopping. She sprints back home, pushing and shoving everyone in the sparsely-populated street and mounts walls with Shaolin ease, growling and grunting all along. From the dialogues, the one that stays with you and perhaps, would be something you’d share with your grandkids some day, is – “Pagal woh nahin jisse bhoot dikhte hain, par woh jisse insaan nahin dikhte.” The film also furnishes this bhoot as a computer-generated kamikaze crow and a slithering serpent – both subscribing to the Ek Chidiya grade of animation.

Gaurav Arora perseveres to lend dignity to his perplexed Rehaan but his character’s lazily-written lines take away from his performance. For the record, Rehaan’s sexual abstinence remains a raaz even after the film ends. One would imagine that Emraan Hashmi has carved his own niche by now. But his home production stretches his part beyond tolerance and dunks his oversized wig in sewage to undo his worth by at least ten years. The perennially wailing debutante, Kriti Kharbanda had the worst deal. Her possessed character is made to wolf down crunchy cockroaches, bend over backwards and lie in a pool of her own mucky drool. Luckily, her OTT makeup eclipses her face and she can make her debut again.

If Vikram Bhatt fancies himself as a weaver of stories, he’s gone over the hemline of logic here. Leaning on tested techniques of evoking fear, the eventual jolt never lives up to the build-up.