The first full trailer for The Vvaan dropped today, and within its opening minute it becomes clear that director Deepak Kumar Mishra is not interested in easing audiences into familiar territory. The film, slated for a September 25, 2026 release, pairs Sidharth Malhotra with Tamannaah Bhatia in what the makers describe as a collision between cold rationality and the untamed world of Indian folklore. The trailer runs just over two minutes and spends most of that time building an atmosphere of creeping dread rather than revealing its monster outright.
Malhotra plays a city-bred man who returns to his ancestral village and, for reasons the trailer only hints at, crosses into a forest his family has avoided for generations. That transgression, according to the film's official synopsis, awakens a divine goddess - a force the protagonist initially refuses to accept as anything other than superstition. The trailer leans hard into this tension, cutting between fluorescent-lit urban interiors and firelit forest rituals, as though the film itself cannot decide which world is more dangerous.
The footage makes a point of withholding its central spectacle. We get flashes of an idol's eyes opening, an overturned palanquin, villagers sprinting through undergrowth at night, and a brief, almost subliminal glimpse of something massive moving between trees. Mishra, who has spent much of his career in television before graduating to features, seems to understand that a trailer for a folklore-driven thriller works best when it withholds rather than explains. Whether the finished film maintains that discipline is another question, but the marketing so far is shrewd.
What the trailer does reveal is an ensemble considerably deeper than the two leads. Nimrat Kaur appears in what looks like a pivotal, guarded role, while the supporting cast signals that The Vvaan intends to balance its supernatural horror with comic and musical relief. Maniesh Paul is credited as VP, Sunil Grover as Deepak, Shweta Tiwari as Sushila, Manu Rishi Chadha, and Yo Yo Honey Singh as Hardy Thakur - a lineup that suggests the film's tonal register will swing between dread and something considerably lighter. How gracefully those swings land will likely determine the film's reception.
For Bhatia, The Vvaan arrives at a busy moment in her career, and the trailer positions her character as more than a passive counterweight to Malhotra's sceptic. She appears to be the one who understands, or at least accepts, what the village is dealing with - a dynamic that could give the film an interesting push-and-pull at its centre. Malhotra, meanwhile, is playing a variation on a role he has handled before: the reasonable man forced to abandon reason. The trailer's most effective beat is a quiet one, in which he stares at something off-screen and his expression shifts from disbelief to something closer to fear.
The film's official synopsis frames the stakes in unambiguous terms: the protagonist "must rise as the village's only saviour to protect his people from annihilation." That is a lot of weight for one man to carry, and the trailer does not shy away from the scale of the threat. There are burning huts, a crowd on its knees, and a shot of an idol that seems to be looking directly at the camera. Mishra is clearly aiming for the kind of mythological thriller that treats rural belief systems as both terrifying and legitimate.
The Vvaan is a Hindi-language Bollywood production, and its September 25 release date places it in a crowded corridor. That timing cuts both ways: it gives the film a festival-season audience, but it also means it will need to distinguish itself quickly. The trailer's strongest asset is its specificity - the forest, the rituals, the goddess - which sets it apart from the more generic supernatural fare that cycles through theatres every few months. Its weakest asset is also its specificity: folklore-driven films live or die on whether audiences find the mythology coherent rather than simply atmospheric.
At present, The Vvaan carries no aggregate rating, and its runtime has not been disclosed. Those details will matter less than whether the film can sustain the promise of its trailer across a full feature. Mishra has assembled a cast with genuine range, and the premise - a rational man forced to reckon with powers beyond logic - is sturdy enough to support both action and genuine unease. What remains to be seen is whether the film commits to its own mythology or retreats into the safety of jump scares. The trailer suggests it is aiming higher.
Source: Filmibeat
