No one ever suspects the humble butterfly.

Despite the title, Raaz: The Mystery Continues (2009) is not a sequel to 2002’s Raaz It’s an entirely separate J-horror influenced Bollywood ghost story about a woman teaming up with a mysterious man to investigate a dark mystery which leads back to her own life, and the people closest to her. And when it sticks to that formula, Raaz: The Mystery Continues is a pretty good movie.

Nandita (Kangana Ranaut), affectionately known to her friends as “Nutty,” is a successful model in a somewhat dysfunctional relationship with Yash (Adhyayan Suman), weaselly documentary filmmaker, militant atheist, and host of an award winning TV show about superstition. The couple have just moved into Nandita’s dreamhouse, and life is good.

Life is not so good for Privthi (Emraan Hashmi), a struggling artist with a drinking problem and a strong resemblance to Brian from Spaced. Privthi’s recent paintings all feature a woman he doesn’t know in various states of dire peril. When he realizes that the woman in the paintings is Nandita, he decides to stalk her for a while, apparently believing that she’s be more likely to listen to a spooky warning from the man who has been following her around and staring for the past few days.

When Privthi finally approaches Nandita, she doesn’t believe him. She escapes as soon as she can, goes home, and takes a bath . . . only to be attacked in the tub by a ghost. She survives, but winds up on the floor with a slit wrist, in a pose which exactly mirrors one of Privthi’s paintings.

Despite Nandita’s protests, everyone assumes that she cut her own wrist. The ghostly attacks continue, but only when Nandita is alone, so no one believes her. Yash is particularly useless, accusing her of not being atheistic enough and therefore reflecting badly on his professional image. He suggests that they get married and go on a long vacation. Instead, Nandita turns to Privthi for help; he’s discovered a series of mysterious suicides near a chemical factory in northern India, and the attacks on Nadita seem to fit the pattern. The two set off on a road trip, and things get worse.

As a ghost story, Raaz: The Mystery Continues is very well done. There are some genuine scares here; I may never use an ATM again. And while a few scenes are lifted from western movies, they work in context. The movie tries to be about more than that, though, and that’s where it stumbles.
This is yet another bhoot movie which tries to present a conflict between faith and reason.

Unfortunately, Yash, the designated representative of reason, is an atheist strawman whose arguments against religion all boil down to “You shouldn’t believe that! That’s stupid!” To be fair, the token representative of organized religion in the movie is at first corrupt and then insane; I suspect we’re supposed to contrast Yash with Privthi, who carries his father’s Gita with him everywhere, but never actually talks about religion.

The importance of faith isn’t the real message of the movie, however. In her opening narration, Nandita alludes to the Butterfly Effect, the idea that a butterfly flapping its wings in one part of the world could lead to a tornado in another. Nandita eventually decides that she is responsible for everything, that the chain of events leading to the hauntings can be traced back to a bit of casual bad advice that she offered to the wrong person. The clear moral of the movie is that even the smallest actions can have dire consequences, so we should be careful about what we say and do. While the ghost seems to share Nandita’s interpretation of events, I think they’re both wrong. The film’s genuine villains were engaged in their corrupt and murderous behavior long before Nandita said anything, and the person she gave the bad advice to made his own choice; she’s not responsible at all. “Be careful of what you say and do, because small actions can have big consequences” is a valuable life lesson, but it really doesn’t apply here, and attempting to make it apply seems forced and more than a little silly.

Raaz: The Mystery Continues is a solid ghost story with its heart in the right place and its head on backwards.