It's a fairly okay attempt at mixing Indianness to the American horror pedestal. If the sole idea here was to establish Megan Suri as a performer who can do the heavy-lifting, then it does the job. Since it's Halloween season, way too many indie horror films are coming out, and most of them struggle to stand apart, even when I constantly applaud the effort. In this case, the plot and its beats come across as mostly derivative, with inspirations drawn from several Asian and Hollywood horror flicks. The developments aren't startling, and I don't think it's particularly great for a horror film when you're able to predict the exact moment of each jumpscare. The creature effects also remind you of certain other films, including Rob Savage's recent The Boogeyman.

The screenplay doesn't try to build the lore around the demon all that much, as it's more interested in throwing jumpscares at you, one after the other. And when it does make mild attempts, the outcome ends up looking unintentionally funny (like, the whole cooking scene to summon the demon.. and, for what?). Megan Suri is good at emoting, but I wish the character had more texture. Sometimes, I found it hard to differentiate her from "just another high schooler". The boyfriend, the teacher, and every other supporting character were always meant to be predictable bait.

Well we've had Mandarin and Spanish integrated into dual-dialogue Hollywood films recently, so I suppose it was only a matter of time before another language featured - and we have it here in the partial use of Hindi. Thereafter, though, this is an entirely unremarkable drama centring around the young "Sam" (Megan Suri) who is trying to balance her life of traditional roots and modern American attitudes. This confusion and uncertainty, coupled with a recently smashed jam jar is allowing a strange and powerfully malevolent critter to come out and thrive on all of this discord - and to kidnap her best mate "Tam" (Mohana Krishnan) - the original owner of the jar! Can "Sam" and her all-American beau "Russ" (Gage Marsh) possibly get to the bottom of it all? As surely as we will all soon be leaving the cinema - and that's really the problem here. There is nothing at all new, nothing scary - the visual effects; darkened streets, flickering lightbulbs - we've all seen it so often before and though the Indian cultural aspect is welcome, it doesn't really add anywhere near enough to this teenage adequately performed finding-herself story that rather bored me. Halloween telly if ever I saw it, I wouldn't bother paying to see it at a cinema, sorry.