Dybbuk: The Curse is Real (2021) begins as Bollywood movies about possession tend to begin; a young couple moves to a big house in a new place, and the husband spends all of his time at work, leaving his wife home alone to face the slow drip of supernatural activity. In this case, the young couple are Sam Isaac (Emraan Hashmi) and his wife Mahi (Nikita Dutta). Sam is a nuclear waste management specialist, and he's just taken a job at a storage facility in Mauritius. Mahi feels alone and isolated, so she comforts herself by buying items for the new house, including an ornate wine box covered in Jewish iconography that she found at Vendredi Antiquesa local antique shop.
What Mahi doesn't know is that an employee of the antique store died violently after trying to open the box, which is the sort of information that really ought to be disclosed to a potential buyer. Mahi takes the box home, opens it, and gets a nose full of dybbuk. Suddenly Mahi is behaving very strangely, staring blankly and caressing the box. And then she starts seeing a ghostly girl who follows her around and calls out for "Ezra." Like all husbands in Bollywood possession movies, Sam assumes she's just being hysterical until he starts hearing footsteps in the attic at night, then he suddenly starts taking things seriously.
Sam talks about the haunting with his childhood priest, Father Gabriel (Denzil Smith). Father Gabriel suspects that the ghost is a dybbuk, and sends Sam to Rabbi Benyamin (Anil George). Benyamin listens to Sam's story and tells him that it can't be a dybbuk because a dybbuk can only possess someone whose body and soul are not quite in alignment. Everyone is relieved until Sam learns that Mahi is pregnant, and Benyamin explains that it takes a while for a baby's body and soul to line up properly.
(The movie takes some pains to explain that the word "dybbuk" actually refers to the box, and the possessing spirit is a shedim. Then everybody forgets that and keeps calling the spirit a dybbuk, which is just as well because the idea of a dybbuk box does not come from Jewish folklore, it comes from a fairly recent urban legend.)
Shortly after delivering the necessary exposition, Bemyamin dies, and it's hunky Rabbi Markus (Manuv Kaul) who must confront the ghost. He doesn't go right away, though; he spends some weeks researching ways to get rid of the dybbuk without anybody dying. Sam and Mahi manage to return to a sort of normalcy in the meantime, but when an obviously possessed Mahi goes on a late night barefoot walk through the city, Markus arrives just in time.
Markus does more research and discovers that the dybbuk was once Abraham Ezra (Imaad Shah), a nice Jewish boy who fell in love with Norah (Darshana Banik) before religious prejudice destroyed their lives. He learns that Ezra the dybbuk is a weapon, shaped by his Kabbalist father (Yuri Suri) to find a host capable of destroying Mauritius. And he just might have found the perfect candidate.
Despite the trappings of Judaism, the ghost in dybbuk works just like a common Bollywood bhoot, and it's dealt with in a similar way, only with menorahs instead of trishuls and Kabbalah rather than Tantric sorcery. Ezra's history is the most effective use of the cultural background, tying in to the real-world history of Jews in Mauritius, and providing a parallel to Sam and Mahi's interfaith marriage.
While Dybbuk is a much more traditional ghost story than it would like you to think, it is a very well-crafted ghost story. There are twists, but the twists are set up in advance and they make sense based on what has come before. It's a movie that plays fair.
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