If you’ve ever wished Vikram Bhatt would remake Raaz yet again but with less suspense, more moaning about “bodily desire,” and the plot logic of a daily soap on fast-forward, Bloody Ishq is here to grant that cursed wish.
This is being sold as a “horror thriller set on a remote Scottish island.” What you actually get is:
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one gloomy mansion,
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one endlessly confused heroine,
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one suspiciously horny husband,
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and about two and a quarter hours of déjà vu.
Amnesia, But Make It Boring
We open with Neha (Avika Gor) drowning, which is a subtle visual metaphor for what the script will be doing for the next 138 minutes. She’s rescued, wakes up, and discovers she has amnesia. Her husband Romesh (Vardhan Puri), heir to the island and owner of the world’s shadiest facial expressions, calmly explains that:
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They’re on their island.
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They’re turning their mansion into a hotel.
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Everything is fine and normal and she definitely shouldn’t question anything, especially not him.
In a better film, this setup would fuel paranoia and tension: is Romesh loving or lying? Is Neha remembering, or hallucinating? Instead, the movie treats amnesia as an excuse to repeat the same conversations every 15 minutes.
Neha: “I feel like something is wrong.”
Romesh: “It’s just your memory.”
Paranormal thing: crashes something loudly in the background
Romesh: “See? Wind.”
Repeat until you start to question your own grip on reality.
Haunted House by Way of Saas-Bahu
The house is supposedly haunted by the spirit of Romesh’s dead father (Rahul Dev), whose mysterious death may or may not be murder. There are knocks, shadows, jump scares involving mirrors, the usual haunted-house starter pack.
But instead of building dread, the film stages these moments like emotional reaction shots in a soap:
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Cut to Neha looking worried in a corridor.
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Cut to a curtain flapping.
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Cut to a portrait.
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Cut back to Neha, now more worried.
And then, just when something might actually escalate, it’s time for a slow, moody song about love, loss, and the importance of Avika Gor looking devastated near a window. You can practically feel the ghosts getting impatient: “Madam, can we scare you now or will there be one more montage?”
Romesh: Husband, Heir, Walking Red Flag
Vardhan Puri’s Romesh spends most of the movie hovering between “caring husband” and “man you would absolutely Google before marrying.” He has that quietly menacing energy of a guy who’d gaslight you about both your memories and the furniture arrangement.
Neha gradually learns that his father died under suspicious circumstances, that her past self suspected Romesh was involved, and that absolutely no one on this island has ever heard of therapy or police. Instead of using this for a slow-burn marital thriller, the film opts for tedious exposition via new side characters who wander in just long enough to deliver Important Information and then vanish like unpaid interns.
We’re told Neha is torn between fear of Romesh and her “constant bodily desire” for him, which the script helpfully underlines multiple times as if worried we might miss how edgy that sounds. In practice, it plays like:
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Scene 1: “I don’t trust you.”
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Scene 2: lingering stare, passionate embrace
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Scene 3: “No, but seriously, I don’t trust you.”
Call it Fifty Shades of Raaz if you must, but maybe the real horror is the relationship counselling they clearly never got.
Horror by Copy-Paste
Vikram Bhatt has made some legitimately effective horror in the past, but Bloody Ishq feels like a collage of his greatest hits, minus the “hits” part. You can spot pieces of Raaz, 1920 and half a dozen other desi ghost dramas just rolling across the screen like tumbleweed.
We get:
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The Beautiful But Doomed Couple in a Mansion™
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The Tragic Backstory of a Dead Parent™
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The Island/Forest/Remote Setting Where Nobody Can Hear You Overact™
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Paranormal Investigators Who Arrive Too Late to Help™
Yes, there are actual paranormal investigators this time—Tanisha Joseph and Abhay Chandok—who pop up wearing the universal “we are professionals” outfits and deliver jargon for a bit, but the script treats them like side quests. They don’t drive the plot; they briefly wave at it.
The jump scares come on schedule but rarely land. Doors slam, phones glitch, Neha gasps. The sound design tries so hard to make you jump that it starts to feel like harassment. You don’t scream because you’re scared; you flinch because the mix just assaulted your eardrums again.
2 Hours 18 Minutes of “We’ve Seen It All Before”
This thing is 138 minutes long. One hundred and thirty-eight.
If you’re going to ask audiences to stay in one haunted mansion and one mood (mild dread + lust) for that long, you need either:
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complex characters,
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escalating mystery,
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inventive scares,
or at least one ghost who isn’t just here to rattle fixtures and drop hints.
Instead, the story creeps ahead like it’s stuck buffering. Neha discovers a clue, panics, confronts Romesh, gets dismissed, sees something spooky, forgets it, repeat. The “big secrets” are both predictable and undercooked—you’ll likely guess the general direction halfway through, then spend the rest of the runtime waiting for the film to finally catch up to you.
Critics in India haven’t exactly been generous either; early reviews called it shoddy, ill-conceived and one of Bhatt’s weaker efforts, pointing out how dated it feels in an era where horror has moved on to much sharper, smarter territory.
Avika Gor Deserved a Better Haunting
Here’s the annoying part: Avika Gor is actually trying. She sells Neha’s confusion and paranoia as best she can, especially in the early sections when the film briefly teases something psychologically interesting—what if your own desire feels suspect because you don’t remember the person you’re desiring?
But the script keeps reducing her to “cry, doubt, kiss, scream, repeat.” There are flashes where you see the movie couldhave explored consent, memory, and gaslighting in a genuinely disturbing way. Instead, it uses those ideas as wallpaper behind the usual ghost–husband–mansion loop.
Vardhan Puri does what he can with “possibly evil, possibly misunderstood” but the writing never commits either way until it’s way too late. By then you’re past caring—you just want someone, anyone, alive or dead, to wrap this up.
Scotland, But Make It TV Serial
The remote Scottish island setting is an inspired idea on paper: fog, cliffs, sea, isolation. The kind of place where a scream would just get politely absorbed by the mist.
But barring a few pretty establishing shots, the film largely ignores the unique mood that setting could bring. The mansion interiors are generically gloomy, the outdoors barely used, and you never really feel the geography of the place. It could just as easily be “mansion near Lonavala with imported wallpaper.”
Instead of letting the island itself become a character, the movie treats it like an obligation: “We said ‘Scotland’ in the press release; here’s some cold water and two rocks, now back to these curtains.”
Romance, But With Ghosts and RSI
The title promises “Bloody Love,” and the film keeps assuring you that this is a twisted romance: a woman with no memory, an obsessive husband with dark secrets, love and desire surviving in the shadow of death.
In reality, the “bloody” is mostly metaphorical and the “love” feels like a contractual clause. Their chemistry rarely transcends “two attractive people standing near each other while the camera spins sadly.” The supposed erotic tension is undercut by pacing so lethargic you could fit an ad break between every significant glance.
If this is bloody love, it mostly feels like the kind you’d get from repeatedly banging your head against the wall waiting for something to happen.
Final Diagnosis: Haunted by Better Movies
Bloody Ishq isn’t unwatchable in the fun, so-bad-it’s-good way. It’s worse than that: it’s aggressively, professionally mediocre—a stitched-together echo of earlier Bhatt horrors, with just enough craft to function and just enough dead weight to make you wish you’d rewatched Raaz instead.
If you’re a die-hard Avika Gor fan or a completionist for every Vikram Bhatt ghost project, you might squeeze some enjoyment out of the performances and a couple of decent atmospheric shots. Everyone else?
Let’s just say: if you find yourself stranded on a remote island with your suspiciously intense husband and a haunted in-laws’ mansion… that might actually be less painful than sitting through this script.
