If you’ve ever watched a horror movie and thought, “This is fine, but what if it felt like a very expensive PowerPoint about Jewish folklore, shot in Mauritius, starring Emraan Hashmi being deeply tired?”, then Dybbuk is probably what your cursed wish would produce.
On paper, this thing sounds kind of cool: a Bollywood horror remake of a Malayalam film (Ezra), Jewish mysticism, an antique dybbuk box, rabbis, Mauritius as a backdrop. In execution, it’s like someone took The Conjuring, ran it through a filter labeled “Corporate Remake Mode,” stripped out the tension, and left only the exposition and furniture.
The Plot: Some Assembly Required, Scares Not Included
We start with Mahi (Nikita Dutta), freshly married, freshly pregnant, and wandering around Mauritius like a lifestyle influencer who accidentally wandered onto a horror set. She buys an antique Jewish box—the titular dybbuk box—because of course she does. If horror movies have taught us anything, it’s that nobody in cinema has ever heard of “don’t buy haunted-looking antiques from dead people.”
Her husband Sam (Emraan Hashmi) works for a nuclear waste disposal company, which sounds like it should function as a metaphor for toxicity or corruption or at least give us some kind of subplot. Instead, it mostly just exists so he can look stressed in offices between hauntings.
Once the box arrives, the couple begins to experience paranormal activity: weird noises, moving shadows, ominous vibes, you know the drill. You can practically see the checklist on the screen:
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Eerie hallway shot? ✅
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Sudden sound cue followed by nothing? ✅
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Person turns, nobody there? ✅
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Someone stares into the middle distance as the music swells? Double ✅
Eventually, they realize the box contained a dybbuk—a malevolent, displaced spirit from Jewish folklore—and that Mahi is essentially haunted/uplifted/possessed by an angry dead guy with unresolved issues and a very convoluted backstory.
Enter the rabbis:
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Rabbi Benyamin (Anil George), who shows up like the tech support guy for demonic possession: calm, slightly bored, and drowning in lore.
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Rabbi Markus (Manav Kaul), Benyamin’s son, who wants to do the exorcism in style—on Yom Kippur, with all the bells, whistles, and ritual accessories.
Then there’s the tragic backstory of Abraham Ezra (Imaad Shah), the Jewish man whose soul becomes the dybbuk after his Christian girlfriend Norah kills herself and a mob turns his life into a burning, broken mess. It’s meant to be tragic, emotional, and heavy. Instead it plays like someone explaining an interesting movie that you sadly don’t get to see.
From there, it’s all:
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Rituals
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Flashbacks
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Men in long coats reciting names of angels
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Emraan Hashmi looking grim while the score screams “THIS IS IMPORTANT”
You realize about halfway through that this isn’t really a horror film so much as a reasonably well-shot brochure about what a dybbuk is, covered in a faint layer of marital melodrama.
The Horror: All Atmosphere, No Pulse
Here’s the thing: horror can absolutely be slow and atmospheric. But it still has to feel alive.
Dybbuk technically includes all the right genre ingredients:
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Spooky house
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Pregnant woman in danger
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Religious experts
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Sad backstory involving forbidden love and mob violence
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Possession, exorcism, mysterious deaths
But it stages them like a corporate compliance video. Every scare feels telegraphed. Every beat feels recycled from other movies that did it better. It’s like watching a cover band that only knows one song: “Generic Jump Scare in Minor Key.”
There’s almost no escalation. You’re never really afraid of the dybbuk as a personality—he’s just “revenge ghost with sad history,” one of many in the Horror Cinematic Universe. The film wants you to feel the weight of Jewish mysticism and historical injustice. What you feel instead is mild boredom and the occasional startle when the sound design remembers it has a job.
Mauritius: Exotic Wallpaper and Not Much Else
The movie is set and shot in Mauritius, which is a flex… that the script doesn’t know what to do with.
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The island could’ve given the film a distinct flavor: cross-cultural tension, postcolonial history, religious diversity, something.
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Instead, it functions as a pleasant backdrop: lots of green, blue, and tasteful architecture, like a destination wedding video where the bride keeps getting possessed.
We get hints of the island’s Jewish presence—like Yakub Ezra, the last Jew in Mauritius—but even that feels strangely bloodless. There’s so much potential in that premise alone, and the movie mostly uses it to explain why the box is there and who the spirit used to be.
Nothing about the setting ever feels integral. This story could’ve been set in Mumbai, Goa, or “Generic Hill Station No. 5,” and almost nothing would change except the hotel rates.
Emraan Hashmi vs. The Script
Emraan Hashmi is no stranger to supernatural thrillers. He’s done enough of them to earn a lifetime membership in the “resident troubled guy in horror” club. In Dybbuk, he gives you exactly what you expect:
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Brooding
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Haunted eyes
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Sincere attempts to react to CGI and invisible forces as if something truly terrifying is happening
But the script gives him almost nothing interesting to do. Sam is just there to be:
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Skeptical, then believing
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Worried about his wife and unborn child
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The guy standing between the audience and paragraphs of exposition
He doesn’t have much interiority beyond “guilty about something” and “wants to save his family.” It’s Horror Husband 101, and we’ve seen it a thousand times.
Nikita Dutta as Mahi fares slightly better emotionally, but again, the writing keeps her on rails: become haunted, feel fear, cry, be acted upon by forces, stand still in a saree while a spirit speaks through you.
We’re meant to care about their marriage and their grief after a previous miscarriage, but those details are dropped in like mandatory emotional seasoning rather than actually driving the story. It’s less a character study and more a checklist of sympathy triggers.
The Dybbuk: Great Concept, Flat Execution
Jewish folklore is rich and wild and often deeply unsettling. A dybbuk—a fragmented soul clinging to the living out of rage or unfinished business—is horror gold. You can mine identity, guilt, justice, displacement, and memory from that idea alone.
Dybbuk mostly mines… Wikipedia.
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The lore is dumped on us via rabbis and flashbacks.
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The themes are gestured at—religious prejudice, forbidden love, generational pain—but never really felt.
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The dybbuk itself has complexity in its backstory, but the film doesn’t leverage that complexity to create interesting moral tension in the present.
Imagine if the story really wrestled with whether the spirit’s anger is justified. Or if Sam and Mahi had to make a difficult choice that wasn’t just “save baby vs. banish spirit.” Instead, the stakes stay largely procedural: complete the ritual, survive till the end credits.
Pacing: Long Ritual, Short Payoff
The film’s structure can be summed up as:
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Setup
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Mild haunting
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Long explanation
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Longer ritual
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Resolution that feels like someone suddenly remembered to end the movie
Nothing truly shocking happens. No twist recontextualizes everything in a memorable way. No character decision makes you go, “Wow, that’s brutal/interesting/horrifying.” You just drift along, waiting for the rabbis to finish their work.
By the time the climactic exorcism rolls around, you’re less scared and more like, “Is this a limited-series finale I skipped three episodes of, or…?”
The Remake Problem: Familiar, But Not Fresh
Since this is a remake of Ezra, it already comes pre-loaded with a story and structure. But instead of using that as a base to improve, sharpen, or reinterpret, Dybbuk feels like it’s just carefully tracing around the original with a more polished pen.
Remakes work best when they either:
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Deepen the original’s themes
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Update them for a new context in a bold way
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Or completely reimagine the approach
Here, we get “same thing, slightly shinier, slightly duller.” It’s like reheated leftovers plated nicely and served with a flourish. You can eat it, but you know it used to be better.
Final Verdict: A Spirit in Search of a Soul
Dybbuk is not unwatchable. It’s competently shot, decently acted, and occasionally atmospheric. But that almost makes it worse, because you can see the good version of this movie hiding in the shadows, watching, waiting, and muttering, “If only someone had actually committed to being scary or meaningful.”
Instead, what we get is:
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A solid concept drained of urgency
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A gorgeous location used mostly as wallpaper
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Strong folklore handled like a PowerPoint presentation
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Characters who exist to carry lore, not emotions
If a dybbuk is a wandering soul that desperately wants to live again, Dybbuk the movie feels like the opposite: a technically living thing that’s somehow missing a soul.
And no amount of chanting, candles, or rabbis can exorcise that particular problem.
