Cast: Kajol, Ronit Roy, Indraneil Sengupta, Kherin Sharma, Surjyasikha Das, Jitin Gulati
Director: Vishal Furia
Platform: In Cinemas June 27 2025
Rating out 5: ★★
There’s a fine line between ambition and delusion, and MAA, Kajol’s new foray into the horror-mythology genre, spends two hours teetering precariously on that line before tumbling headfirst into the latter. It’s not that I don’t admire the effort. Bollywood, long comfortable in the plush safety of romances and masala flicks, is clearly trying to step into new terrain, genre cinema, horror, fantasy, the works. Good. It’s necessary.
But what MAA proves painfully, in real time, is that guts alone don’t make a good film. Execution matters. Precision matters. And in this case, both are sorely missing.
Let’s start with the basics. The film pitches itself as a mythological horror story, an intriguing enough premise in a country brimming with ancient lore, buried deities, and intergenerational trauma. There’s no shortage of themes to mine. But instead of drawing from that deep well of rich, terrifying folklore, MAA opts for a paint-by-numbers supernatural tale, dressed up in Sanskrit chants and digital temple smoke.
The result? A movie that wants to scare you, but barely makes you flinch. And the only time you do is because it cheats. It just gets too loud, all of a sudden. That isn’t fear, it’s surprise, followed by mild annoyance.
The VFX and CGI elements are woefully undercooked. You don’t need a Marvel-sized budget to conjure fear, but you do need vision, and, more importantly, competence. What we get here looks like it was rendered by a well-meaning but underqualified first-year animation student. Demon eyes that glitch like a cheap Instagram filter, floating objects that don’t carry any weight, the VFX scenes resemble a video game from 2005.
MAA seems to hope it can compete with releases like How to Train Your Dragon, Jurassic World, and even Brad Pitt’s upcoming F1 movie, all of which seamlessly integrate CGI with immersive world-building. But MAA feels like an awkward throwback. Not a homage, an accident. It’s like showing up to a Formula One race in a three-wheeled rickshaw. You can appreciate the spunk, but you know how this ends.
The worst sin a horror film can commit isn’t bad acting or a sloppy plot. It’s being unintentionally funny. And MAA stumbles into that trap with gusto. Several moments, clearly intended to be chilling, had people in my screening giggling in the back rows. That kind of audience reaction isn’t just unfortunate, it’s fatal.
A horror movie lives and dies on atmosphere, on tension, on that slowly tightening noose of dread. But when the demon floats in, dead-eyed and badly lit, looking less like a terror and more like a bad cosplay, the spell is broken. The laughs begin. And suddenly, you’re watching a parody of a film that takes itself far too seriously.
Now, Kajol. She’s good, as she usually is. She throws herself into the role with sincerity, summoning emotion from a script that gives her very little to work with. You believe her pain, her desperation, even when the dialogue around her is creaking like old floorboards. But she’s acting in a vacuum. The film doesn’t rise to meet her. In a better movie, her performance might’ve anchored something moving, or at least coherent. Here, it’s just a small island of quality in a sea of mediocrity.
The plot? Barely there. You can almost see the narrative seams, the outlines of story beats copied and pasted from other, better films. There’s a haunted house. A dark secret. A child in peril. Some mumbo-jumbo about karma and sacrifice. Blah blah blah. And of course, a final-act twist that tries to be profound but just seems rushed.
You’ve seen this movie before, and it’s been done better.
But here’s the thing: I’m not here to mock the attempt. Bollywood is trying something new. That matters. It’s stepping into genre territory it has mostly avoided for decades, and that’s worth encouraging.
The problem with MAA is that it doesn’t understand the genre it’s playing with. Horror isn’t just about scary faces and jump cuts. It’s about tone, mood, restraint. The fear comes from what you don’t see. From tension that builds slowly and purposefully. From sound design that creeps under your skin. From visual effects that support, not smother the story. And all of that is missing here.
So what we’re left with is a film that wants to be The Conjuring but doesn’t come close. It has flashes of promise, but they’re few and far between. The rest is just noise.
In the end, MAA is a missed opportunity. It wanted to be a game-changer, the film that brought mythology-based horror into the mainstream. But instead of feeling shaken or scared, I walked out tired. Not horrified. Not moved. Just tired.
Two stars, and those are mostly for Kajol.
In the end, MAA feels like a film caught between two worlds: the sacred and the cinematic, the ancient and the artificial. But it never quite finds its footing in either. It’s the kind of movie that thinks ambition alone will carry it across the finish line, but forgets that audiences today demand more than just good intentions. They want craft. They want clarity. They want to feel something.
What MAA delivers instead is a hollow echo of what it could have been, a genre experiment that never commits, never lands, and ultimately disappears from memory the moment the lights come up.
