In short: Bhoot – Part One: The Haunted Ship (2020)

Prithvi (Vicky Kaushal), a shipping officer with the mandatory tragically dead family, is tasked with the surprisingly complicated mission to get an empty dilapidated ship away from the Mumbai beach it has mysteriously stranded on. Things become rather complicated, for the ship is as haunted as a swimming haunted house, and its hauntings seem to fit disturbingly well to Prithvi’s tragically-dead-family-PTSD.

I have to admire the optimistic streak of the title of Bhanu Pratap Singh’s Hindi horror movie, yet at the same time can’t help asking myself if calling one’s horror movie “Ghost – Part One” is really much better than just calling it “Generic Contemporary Mainstream Horror Movie - Part One”. This is yet another one of those Hindi films made in the last couple of years that is clearly mainly influenced by US mainstream horror fare like the The Conjuring movies, eschewing most of the locally specific of much Indian horror for the generically “international”, losing a lot of charm and winning rather a lot of clichés in the process. So expect jump scares, false scares mostly based on pompous music, and ghosts that look exactly like all other ghosts in contemporary mainstream horror movies do. To be fair, Singh’s actually pretty good at this part of the horror game, timing much of this funhouse nonsense well enough the resulting movie is enjoyable throughout. Why, there’s even a bit of a thematic connection between the film’s guilt-ridden lead and the haunting he is investigating.


I certainly had more fun with this than with the Conjuring films, if only thanks to the film’s excision of all crazy fringe Christianity and because lead Vicky Kaushal is not quite as aggressively bland as Patrick Wilson is. Plus, there are surprisingly few decent movies about haunted ships.