Fortunately, anyone can be told precisely what Srivalli is.

Srivalli (2017) is a science fiction thriller about artificial reality and multiple levels of consciousness.  It is also a sleazy erotic thriller about an obsession which spans multiple lifetimes.  And it is occasionally a Lifetime drama about a woman who has had enough and is ready to fight back.  Genre boundaries are more like guidelines, really.

Valli (Neha Hinge) is returning to India after twelve years in the US, accompanied by her little brother and their father, Ramachandra (Ranjeev Kanakala.)  Her incredibly devoted childhood sweetheart, Gowtham (Rajath Krishna), is waiting for her.  And everything is great!  At least until the car accident that kills Ramachandra and puts Valli's brother in a coma.

That's not the end of her problems, though.  Andrea, a classmate of hers from America, has followed her to India.  Andrea is obsessed with Valli, and resumes her unwanted sexual, advances.  When Gowtham finds out, he tracks down Andrea and brutally beats her to death in a jealous rage.  (The Andrea subplot is nasty and unpleasant and perpetuates some horrible tropes about predatory lesbians.)

Since Valli doesn't know that Andrea is dead, Gowtham gets to keep hanging around and playing the Caring Friend Who Wants To be More.  Valli doesn't have time for romance, though - she's fascinated by the work of Doctor Verma, who is hoping to harness the power of brain waves in order to treat addictions and mental illnesses.  Valli agrees to have her brain waves mapped (a process that requires her to be naked, because it's that sort of movie), and she is thrilled to learn that the process can be used to help her comatose brother.  And then Verma leaves for America.

After the professor leaves, Valli is haunted by strange dreams about a mysterious man named Manju (Arhaan Khan), who appears every night at midnight to seduce her.  (I say seduce, but it is strongly implied that there is supernatural coercion involved.)  When she finds Manju's bracelet in her bed one morning, Valli realizes that Manju is no dream.  He claims to be the spirit of her lover from a previous incarnation, but he might be a side effect of Verma's device, or Andrea's vengeful ghost, or just a symptom of Valli's mental decline.

For much of its running time, Srivalli is grimy and unpleasant.  It does improve somewhat when the movie stops trying to be sexy and Valli stops being so passive, but it never rises to the level of a good movie.  Even without the sleaze, it's hard to maintain a sense of mystery about who the true villain is when the audience has already seen one of the characters brutally beat a woman to death because she threatened the object of his obsession.