Expectations: Four Giants, One Tiny Film
On paper, Ghost Stories sounds like a horror fan’s dream and a film student’s wet thesis: four of India’s most prominent directors—Zoya Akhtar, Anurag Kashyap, Dibakar Banerjee, and Karan Johar—each delivering a short horror film, bundled into one Netflix anthology. In practice, it plays like four separate people were told, “Make something scary,” and all of them replied, “What if, instead, we made you deeply tired?”
It’s the cinematic equivalent of staying up until 3 a.m. for a ghost to appear and getting a shaky ceiling fan and indigestion instead.
Zoya Akhtar’s Segment: Nurse, Old Lady, No Pulse
Akhtar’s entry follows Sameera, a young nurse caring for Mrs. Malik, an elderly, bedridden woman in a lonely house that clearly should have come with a disclaimer and an exorcist. There’s a reluctant boyfriend, a creepy old mansion, and a patient whose son is mysteriously “in the next room” despite there being, you know, no son in the next room.
The twist—that Mrs. Malik has actually been dead for days, neglected and starved—is conceptually bleak and could have landed like a gut punch. Instead, it feels less like horror and more like someone adapted a guilt-inducing public service announcement for elder neglect and then forgot to add actual scares.
Atmosphere-wise, Akhtar tries: dim lights, long silences, and the sense that no one here owns a working light bulb. But the segment ends just as it starts to get interesting, cutting away from any real emotional fallout. It’s like ordering a horror entrée and being served the garnish.
Anurag Kashyap’s Segment: Baby Crazy, But Not in a Good Way
Kashyap’s short features Neha, a pregnant woman haunted by grief, paranoia, and her late sister’s unnervingly attached child, Ansh. This should be claustrophobic psychological horror—gaslighting, guilt, maybe a ghost toddler doing absolutely nothing cute.
Instead, it feels like an extended therapy session where no one took notes.
Neha’s deteriorating mental state, her fixation on motherhood, and Ansh’s clingy, unsettling presence all sound rich on paper. But the storytelling leans so heavily on ambiguity that it dissolves into a muddy soup of vibes. Is it supernatural? Is it all in her head? Is there a point? The film shrugs, lights a candle, and wanders off.
The scares are repetitive: child appears, child stares, Neha spirals. It’s less “I’m terrified” and more “I get it, he’s weird, can we move on?” Kashyap aims for Lynchian dread and lands on “overlong YouTube short with good lighting.”
Dibakar Banerjee’s Segment: Zombies, But Make It Pointless
Banerjee’s story is easily the most ambitious: a stranger wanders into a small town, Bees-ghara, finds it mysteriously empty except for a boy and a girl, and learns that everyone has been eaten by the girl’s father—part man, part feral creature, full-time buffet enthusiast.
On the surface, this is the only segment with real horror meat (pun absolutely intended): zombies, cannibalism, social decay, apocalyptic paranoia. But the execution is so tonally confused that it feels like an arthouse remake of The Walking Dead filtered through a bad fever dream.
We get some interesting details: the idea that people start eating others to survive because the monsters won’t eat those who already eat human flesh. That’s a chilling, biting metaphor for moral compromise in crisis… which the film promptly sprints past in favor of more shaky chases and dream/fake-out sequences.
By the time the protagonist is in a pit, refusing to eat a severed hand to prove he’s “one of them,” and then wakes up only to discover he might still be in the nightmare, the segment has gone so deep into “Was it all a dream?” territory that you start to suspect the writers fell asleep mid-draft and just left it in.
It’s thematically dense but dramatically hollow—like a horror film that audited philosophy but dropped out before finals.
Karan Johar’s Segment: Saas, Bahu, and the Afterlife
Johar’s short is about Ira, who marries Dhruv, a man so attached to his dead grandmother he might as well list her as his emergency contact. Granny died decades ago, but Dhruv still has nightly chats with her. Either he’s seeing ghosts, or this is an elite-tier red flag that Ira should have noticed before the pheras.
We get old-school haunted-house kitsch: the grandmother’s room preserved like a shrine, a maid with secrets, family trauma, and—of course—poisoned breakfast. Shanti the maid once helped end the grandmother’s suffering using castor seeds; now it appears she’s done the same for Ira, who wakes up on the other side and finally meets the ghostly matriarch.
This had the potential to be a smart commentary on patriarchal families and suffocating tradition, literally killing off women who refuse to play along. Instead, it’s pitched somewhere between camp and unintentional comedy. The revelation that the grandmother now collects nonbelievers in some ghostly waiting room is less scary and more like the worst housing society committee in the afterlife.
Johar’s tendency toward melodrama doesn’t blend well with horror; it’s like pouring glitter on a corpse and insisting it’s scary.
Performances: Good Actors, Wasted Opportunities
The cast is stacked: Janhvi Kapoor, Sobhita Dhulipala, Mrunal Thakur, Avinash Tiwary, Vijay Varma, Raghuvir Yadav, Pavail Gulati—enough talent here to power three decent films and one really good miniseries.
And yet, the anthology manages to use them like background apps draining battery.
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Janhvi Kapoor brings a fragile, subdued presence as Sameera, but the script gives her little to do beyond looking spooked and confused.
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Sobhita Dhulipala’s Neha has flashes of genuine anguish that suggest a much stronger mental-horror narrative buried somewhere under the ambiguity.
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Mrunal Thakur and Avinash Tiwary do committed work in Johar’s segment, but when your co-star is an off-screen ghost granny and a bowl of lethal oatmeal, there’s a ceiling to what you can achieve.
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The kids in Banerjee’s piece are unsettling, but the film doesn’t build them into anything more than vehicles for exposition and trauma.
It’s a classic case of strong casting in search of a coherent movie.
Horror, or Just a Collection of Grim Situations?
The biggest problem with Ghost Stories is simple: it confuses “dark material” with “horror.” Death, grief, cannibalism, neglect, mental illness, and toxic family dynamics are all present, but they rarely cohere into sequences that are actually frightening.
There’s no sustained tension, no memorable scare set pieces, no sense of escalation. The anthology leans heavily on mood—slow pans, quiet rooms, ragged breathing—and then forgets to pay it off. Horror isn’t just about bad things happening; it’s about how those bad things are staged, paced, and emotionally weaponized.
Here, it often feels like four filmmakers dropped their first drafts into a folder labeled “good enough, Netflix won’t mind.”
Final Verdict: A Haunting… of Missed Chances
Ghost Stories wants to be the final, darker movement in a trilogy that started with Bombay Talkies and moved through Lust Stories. Instead, it plays like an overlong, undercooked experiment where everyone involved is too talented for the final product to be this forgettable.
There are glimmers of what could have been: a chilling metaphor here, an eerie visual there, a performance that briefly cracks the shell of indifference. But as a whole, the film never commits—to horror, to satire, to psychological chaos, to social commentary. It just hovers, like a bored ghost in a house with no one worth possessing.
If you’re looking for a genuinely scary night, Ghost Stories (2020) is less a scream and more a sigh. The only truly haunting thing about it is imagining how good it could have been.
