On the eve of her engagement to Rahul (Arjan Bajwa), Arundhati returns to her ancestral home in Gadwal, only to find that her warm and wonderful loving family are keeping one of the servants chained up in the back yard. Apparently while delivering wedding invitations his car was forced off the road, forcing him to seek shelter in the family's ruined castle, and something happened to drive him mad. The plan is to bring him to Anwar (Sayaji Shinde), the local fakir, to drive out any evil spirits, but Arundhati is a modern skeptical girl, and is not impressed by Anwar's rather brutal exorcism technique, so they drag the poor fellow home again.
That night, Arundhati gets a call from rahul, asking her to meet him at the creepy ruined fort. She doesn't know she's in a horror movie yet, and so she accepts. And, well, she finds out that she's in a horror movie. In the ruined dance studio stands a makeshift mausoleum, with a creepy voice demanding that she let him out. Arundhati responds like an angry queen, loudly proclaiming that she will never let him out, and it looks like she's about to pick a fight right then and there when Anwar arrives, drags her away, and demonstrates that yes, ghosts absolutely do exist.
And it is obviously time for some backstory. Eighty years ago, Arundhati's great grandmother Arundhati (Divya Nagesh) was a child princess, already renowned for her martial skills, courage, and wisdom. her older sister (I cannot find the actor's name - not cool, IMDB!) is married to Pasupathi (Sonu Sood), who is the kind of decadent aristocrat that would make Lord Byron blush.
Pasupathi has absolutely no self control. He's such a monster that he rapes and murders Arundhati's blind dance teacher (Leena Sidhu) in the palace, but when Arundhati goes to her father and demansd that Pasupathi be exiled, she is refused. her father explains that as long as her sister alive and married to the blackguard, he's safe. The sister overhears and takes matters into her own hands, killing herself. At which point Arundhati orders that Pasupathi be beaten to death and then dragged out of town by his own horse.
Unfortunately, Pasupathi isn't quite dead. He's saved by a band of Aghori who teach him dark magic, and seven years later he returns for revenge. By this time, Arundhati has grown into Aushka Shetty, and she manages to defeat the unstoppable sorcerer using only a pair of scarves and the techniques she learned from her blind dance teacher, and also a pair of swords and a chandelier. Because of Pasupathis's magic, though, it's too dangerous to just kill him; instead, they build a mausoleum around him, entombing him alive without even a drop of Amontillado.
Meanwhile, the mad servant escapes and frees the ghost. And Pasupathi - well, he doesn't so much haunt the modern Arundhati as stalk her. Fortunately, the previous Arundhati has planned for this, sacrificing her life to create a weapon (made of her own spine!) that can kill the ghost once and for all. Unfortunately, the ghost knows about the weapon, and it's willing to kill everybody Arundhati loves in order to keep her from it.
In a lot of ways this movie is a throwback to the old Ramsay Brothers horror flicks; there's a lot of blood, and when Pasupathi's a round the camera gets a bit male gazey. It's the Arundhatis that keep things fresh. The Twenties version is an awesome, indomitable warrior queen with awesome fighting skills, while the modern version does not have awesome skills, but is still willing to walk through Hell in order to protect the people she loves. Once again Shetty puts in two distinct and memorable performances.
And I will confess, it's nice, every now and then, to see a ghost who can be defeated with a spinesword and a Glasgow kiss, rather than having to complete his unfulfilled desires. (Especially since the unfulfilled desires are so horrible.)
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