There are movies called Dark because they’re moody and profound, and then there’s Iruttu, which is called Dark because you will spend most of the runtime trying to find the plot with a flashlight and a forensic team.
On paper, this is a supernatural horror thriller about an upright cop, an evil jinn, and a hill station with Arabic occult history. In practice, it’s a three-way car crash between a police procedural, a Muslim demonology lecture, and a knockoff Conjuring sequel that got lost in translation and decided to just keep going.
Welcome to Sigapurahali, Population: Confusion
We open in a hill station where six men are slaughtered by an unseen force in hora grass, which is a very specific detail the movie will never shut up about. Their necks are snapped, there are no fingerprints, no weapons, no logic, just vibes. This is actually one of the better stretches of the film: weird, sparse, unsettling.
Then everyone starts talking.
The cops show up, led by people who apparently trained by watching other movie cops on TV. Officer Palraj stares at the crime scene, announces there’s no evidence, and the movie takes that as permission to stop worrying about sense for the next two hours. Somewhere in the middle of this, a woman tries to set herself on fire at the station and ominous chanting starts. It should be chilling. It feels like someone sat on the soundboard.
Enter our hero: Chezhiyan, played by Sundar C, a cop so serious he relocates with his wife Regina and their daughter Diya to the most cursed hill station in India, presumably because the script needs fresh victims. They stop for a picnic, lose their dog in the forest, and Regina declares it a bad omen. This is the most accurate line in the entire movie.
The Haunted House of Overused Tropes
The family moves into a rental house that looks like it’s been furnished by a steel-obsessed doomsday prepper. Every window and every piece of furniture is metal. “Termites,” explains the constable, as if that justifies living in what is basically a prison with curtains.
Little Diya finds the giant cloth-covered mirror—because of course there’s one—and sees a mannequin move. Regina hears tapping and assumes it’s her kid being annoying, only to open the window to a jump scare of several hundred crows, presumably also annoyed to be in this movie.
Meanwhile, poor Constable Kulandaisamy gets a creepy phone call from a woman crying for help on a line that’s been out of order for two days. He does the only logical thing: panic and drag his superior into the mess.
Chezhiyan and Regina try to have a romantic moment in their steel fortress, but are interrupted by a ragged old man outside the window. This is the film’s idea of a mood: a half-hearted sex scene, a random hermit jump scare, and a constable saying “Don’t worry, he’s harmless.”
Spoiler: the old man has more sense than half the main cast.
The “Scares”: Now With Bonus Laziness
Regina’s alone in the house when the music system turns itself on. She unplugs it; it plugs itself back in. It’s the usual “technology is haunted” routine, and it’s done with all the energy of a low-battery phone. Then she dreams that Diya jumps on her and bites off her neck. She wakes up screaming, and the film seems incredibly proud of itself: look, a dream fake-out! Never seen that before, right?
The problem isn’t that these tropes exist. Horror lives on repetition. The problem is that Iruttu executes them like it’s ticking boxes on a checklist: crows, check. Creepy kid, check. Old man, check. Random disembodied voices, check. At no point does it feel like there’s a coherent idea behind the scares—just a hope that if they throw enough clichés at the screen, at least one will stick.
Enter: Lore Dump, the Movie
Around this point, the script decides it hasn’t confused us enough. So it introduces the Arabic black magic practitioner living on the hill, a Muslim priest, Qur’an verses, the concept of Sila (an evil jinn), and an overly enthusiastic forensic team armed with an internet connection.
The hill station, we are told, was once an Arabic settlement where magic was practiced. There is now an evil jinn woman called Sila wandering around impersonating Regina, licking people, and being allergic to morning prayers. Chezhiyan’s leather jacket moves on its own to indicate ghost proximity. At some point, the magician must chant 4,440 prayers before dawn to keep her at bay. Why 4,440? Because it sounds specific and spooky. That’s it. That’s the depth.
And just when you think the mythology is bloated enough, the film adds Bombay blood group to the mix. Forensics discover that the killer has this ultra-rare blood type, which is somehow crucial to… jinn resurrection logistics? Revenge? A frequent-flyer program? It’s never emotionally satisfying; it’s just one more thing the movie yells at you while you’re trying to remember who’s dead.
Sila: The Least Intimidating Ultimate Evil
Dhansika’s Sila should be terrifying: a powerful, ancient jinn capable of plunging entire regions into darkness. Instead, she spends most of her time doing cosplay as Regina, fake-momming Diya, and sniffing Chezhiyan’s jacket like a supernatural stalker with attachment issues.
She shows up as a silent doppelganger, licks the child in one scene (yes, really), causes some minor dermatological distress, and occasionally kills someone offscreen so we can see the body later in a tree covered in termites. The design and staging never give her a consistent presence; she feels like three different characters glued together in post.
The film keeps insisting she’s not human, not of this world, incredibly dangerous. The actual impact is closer to “annoying neighbor ghost who keeps messing with your home appliances.”
A Climax Built Out of Exposition and Noise
By the time we reach the finale, we’ve sat through:
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A dead magician impaled on a tree and annotated with “16:113” for Qur’anic clue-hunting.
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A lore seminar about six Silas being killed at their weakest time, reincarnated as grass, termites, fish, dog, snake, and one human baby.
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A backstory about a Gujarati woman-jinn who survived an earthquake and is out to kill Diya and her own unborn child to resurrect her sisters and gain ultimate power.
Honestly, if someone pitched this to you as a comedy, it would be brilliant. As a supposedly serious horror thriller, it’s exhausting.
The final act is a blur of Chezhiyan running around being Very Determined, chanting happening somewhere offscreen, Sila popping up to menace the family, and occasional action beats that almost connect emotionally…but don’t. The film never slows down enough to let anything land. It just hurls mythology and CGI at you until finally, mercifully, Sila is defeated and the day is saved.
Do you feel satisfied? Not really. Do you feel relieved? Absolutely.
The Real Horror: 132 Minutes
At 132 minutes, Iruttu is long for a horror film—especially one this reliant on exposition. You could cut 30 minutes of repeated information, slow-motion walking, and filler scares, and still have enough left to confuse an entire audience.
The pacing is a consistent problem: whenever things threaten to become tense, someone stops the story to explain something. Whenever the lore finally gets intriguing, the film cuts away to yet another generic spooky-house scene. It’s like watching two different movies constantly interrupt each other with PowerPoint slides.
Performances Trapped in the Dark
Sundar C does his usual stoic-cop routine, which is fine, except his character is less a person and more a haunted plot-delivery machine. Sakshi Choudhary’s Regina spends most of the movie either scared, confused, or possessed-by-proxy, and the script doesn’t give her much to do beyond react. Dhansika deserves a better jinn role than this; she glowers when allowed, but Sila is written like a mid-level video game boss with a backstory longer than her actual screentime.
Supporting actors like VTV Ganesh and the little girl playing Diya do their best, but they’re orbiting a script that doesn’t care about character as much as it cares about cramming in One More Mythological Detail.
Final Verdict: All Dark, No Depth
Iruttu clearly wants to be a different kind of Tamil horror film—one that draws on Islamic demonology, forensic investigation, and pan-Indian mythology instead of the usual local ghost stories. That’s genuinely interesting on paper. The problem is the execution: it’s messy, overlong, tonally inconsistent, and far more invested in explaining its monsters than making them actually scary.
If you enjoy horror movies that feel like you’ve accidentally wandered into a three-hour crash course on “Jinns, Blood Types, and You,” this might be your jam. For everyone else, the real killer shadow here is the script, smothering every good idea under a pile of lore and jump scares that barely jump.
In a film called Dark, the biggest mystery shouldn’t be “what is going on?”—but here we are.
