Handful of dust sold separately.

Fear (2007) opens with a bang, or rather a splash. Dev Malhotra (Ameet Gaurr) is driving along a dark, foggy, deserted road when his car breaks down. He walks to the nearby river to fetch water for his radiator, when a woman surfaces and grabs him. Dev stops freaking out when he realizes that the woman is calling for help and isn’t actually trying to pull him in or eat his eyeballs. Dev fishes the woman (Alisha Baig) out, and rushes her to the hospital.

The doctors tell Dev that the woman is physically fine, but she has . . . amnesia!!! (Why yes, this is a Bollywood movie. How did you know?) Dev contacts the police and the newspapers, but no one comes forward, and no women of her approximate age have been reported missing. She’s a complete mystery.

She’s also apparently haunted. late at night, she starts seeing things. Dev thinks she’ll feel better once she gets out of the hospital, so he takes her home and introduces her to his loyal housekeeper Shantabai (Kishori Shahane) as Anamika, which means I can stop referring to her as “the woman.”

Anamika does not get better once she leaves the hospital. The hauntings escalate, and after a particularly scary episode Dev takes her to a psychiatrist. Shantabai is less skeptical, and brings her to see Mrs. Kesar, her medium. (Played by somebody, but the IMDB won’t give me a name.) Anamika learns two very valuable things from Mrs. Kesar. First, she’s not crazy; the ghost is very real and very very angry. Second, it’s a bad idea to conduct a seance when your preteen daughter is sleeping in the next room.

Dev doesn’t believe in ghosts, but he’s a decent fellow, so he agrees to help. They consult with a grouchy pandit living in a nearby village. His plan requires Anamika to act as bait. She agrees, and after a few moments of pure terror, the ghost is sealed away forever, and Dev has gone to tell his parents about the lovely amnesiac girl he plans to marry. Sounds like a happy ending, but we’re only forty five minutes into the movie.

Anamika returns home, only to find the police waiting for her, along with Rajit Saxena (Aditya Ralkar), who tells her that her real name is Sanjana, she’s his wife, and he’s taking her away. She agrees, since she’s a nice Indian girl who believes in the sanctity of marriage, and since men who suddenly appear and claim to be the husbands of amnesiacs are always exactly what they seem, rather than concealing any dark, horrible secrets. Mean while, the ghost escapes, and it is angry.

Fear is a solid horror movie, with very little filler; rather than focus on Anamika struggling to regain her memory, for example, it focuses on the fact that she’s being haunted by a really scary ghost. Since we don’t really have designated moments of character development, the characters are defined by what they actually do. By and large, they do good things; with one obvious exception, the characters are decent people making the best of an extraordinary situation. Not surprisingly, it’s easier to care about what’s going to happen to the characters if they’re likable.