The Vvaan Review: A Scattered Mythological Mess

Sidharth Malhotra plays our urban sceptic, a man who treats ancestral superstition the way most of us treat forwarded WhatsApp messages - with a polite eye roll. When circumstance pulls him back to his village, he does the one thing every legend warns against: he crosses into the forbidden forest his family has avoided for generations. That trespass awakens a divine goddess, and with her, something considerably less merciful. What follows is a scramble for survival, as the village's disbelief collides with a threat that refuses to be reasoned away. Our hero must shed his logic-first worldview and become the unlikely saviour his people need before annihilation arrives at their doorstep.

It is a fine skeleton for a film. The trouble is that The Vvaan keeps adding ribs.

Mishra, whose instincts for atmosphere are his strongest asset, opens with genuine menace. The forest sequences are shot with a hushed dread that suggests a director who understands that the best horror lives in the space between sounds. For roughly its first act, the film works. Malhotra underplays his scepticism nicely, and Nimrat Kaur brings a quiet gravity to a role that could easily have been a stereotype. Tamannaah Bhatia, too, gets moments of steel that hint at a more interesting character buried in the drafts.

Then the film remembers it has a supporting cast to service, and the tonal floor gives way. Maniesh Paul and Sunil Grover are gifted comic performers, but their scenes here play like they wandered in from an entirely different production. Shweta Tiwari is underused. And Yo Yo Honey Singh's Hardy Thakur is a casting decision nobody asked for and no one on screen seems sure how to handle. Every time the film builds momentum, a new tonal detour drains it.

Worse is the writing's refusal to commit. Is this a story about faith defeating fear? About logic's limits? About environmental trespass? The film gestures at all three and settles on none, so the climax - which wants to be rousing - plays as loud rather than earned. The visual effects are uneven, serviceable in the smaller scares and visibly strained whenever the goddess takes full form. For a film trading on the divine, that is a real problem.

And yet. There is a version of this movie, maybe twenty minutes shorter and one subplot leaner, that genuinely hums. The bones are there. The performances are there. The conviction is there. What's missing is the discipline to trust the story it actually has.

Pros

• Sidharth Malhotra anchors the chaos with a restrained, believable lead turn
• The forest-set sequences are genuinely atmospheric and well shot
• Nimrat Kaur and Tamannaah Bhatia make the most of underwritten roles
• The central premise - logic versus faith - is a compelling hook

Cons

• Tonally incoherent, lurching between dread, comedy, and melodrama
• Uneven visual effects, especially in the climactic reveal
• Supporting comedy tracks derail momentum at critical moments
• The screenplay never commits to a single thematic idea

The Vvaan is a film at war with itself. It wants to be a folk-horror fable, a family drama, and a mass action entertainer all at once, and it has the ambition to nearly pull it off - but not the script. Malhotra and his co-stars deserve credit for holding the centre, and Mishra shows flashes of a genuinely atmospheric filmmaker. What they needed was a sharper edit and a clearer sense of what this story was actually about. As it stands, it is a watchable misfire: not the saviour its own premise promised, but not a total write-off either. Catch it on a streaming afternoon, ideally with low expectations and a fast-forward button for the comic detours.