There are movies that take you on a journey. Then there’s Last Bus, a 2016 Kannada-language psychological thriller that doesn’t so much take you on a journey as tie you to the bumper and drag you through 100 minutes of confusion, screaming, and cheap fog machine smoke. Written, directed, co-produced, and musically composed by S.D. Arvind (because clearly no one else wanted responsibility for it), Last Bus is what happens when you give a philosophy major a camcorder and tell him to make The Blair Witch Project—but with more sobbing and fewer coherent sentences.
The film has been described by fans as “haunting,” “ambitious,” and “a triumph of art direction.” They forgot one adjective: nonsensical. Watching Last Bus feels like listening to a campfire story told by someone who keeps forgetting their own plot, occasionally stops to sing, and then insists it’s all “symbolism.”
The Setup: The Bus to Hell, or Maybe Just the Woods
We begin with Prithvi (Avinash Diwakar), who’s wandering a scenic mountain road because he gave up on a trekking trip. Within minutes, we’re told trains don’t exist, airports are for the weak, and the only way home is—drumroll—the last busof the day. He boards this mysterious vehicle bound for a village called Hansa, which sounds like a beer brand but looks like a rejected level from a PlayStation 2 survival horror game.
The passengers are an assorted mix of archetypes who seem like they were each pulled from different movies: Mamtha, the crying mother fighting a custody battle; Rita, the runaway lover heading to Mumbai; Seetha, the local woman everyone seems weirdly obsessed with; and Sudhakara, the nervous student with an exam to attend. There’s also the bus driver Tanka, the kind of man whose mustache has seen things, and a priest named Sahasra Sagara, who seems to have been teleported in from a Malayalam exorcism movie.
The group travels through a dense forest that everyone insists is cursed, haunted, or at the very least, poorly lit. Naturally, Prithvi, the only man with functioning skepticism, dismisses this as superstition. Because if horror movies have taught us anything, it’s that the character who mocks the ghost story always ends up getting strangled by it later.
The Detour: Forest of Incompetent Choices
A tree blocks the road—a “bad omen,” according to everyone who’s ever watched a horror film. But our heroes decide to continue through the alternate route, which in horror logic is equivalent to saying, “We’d like to die now, please.”
The driver crashes the bus into a tree, disappears, and starts screaming for help. The passengers, bless their collective lack of sense, follow the noise into a crumbling mansion. The priest warns them not to enter because it’s “evil,” but Prithvi insists, channeling the same energy as a man who thinks ghost tours are “for idiots.” Inside, they find the driver tied to a pillar by what appears to be overcooked spaghetti.
When they untie him, he claims he didn’t scream. Great. Now we’ve got ghosts gaslighting the living.
The Mansion: Now With Bonus Subplots
Meanwhile, back at the bus, the remaining passengers encounter a dagger-wielding old man who looks like Santa Claus if he retired to haunt people out of spite. Everyone panics, runs to the mansion, and for reasons known only to the screenwriter, begins exploring it like they’re on an episode of Haunted Airbnb.
Each person starts hallucinating their “deepest desires,” though it’s never clear whether these are visions or just really bad dreams caused by eating too many samosas. The priest discovers graves from exactly 100 years ago, Seetha gets attacked by demon shrubbery, and someone literally drowns in quicksand. Yes, quicksand. Because when you’ve run out of ideas, the 1980s are always there to lend a cliché.
Plot Twist: Reality Show from Hell
Just when you think the movie can’t get weirder, Last Bus swerves into another genre entirely. It turns out all these spooky happenings are part of a reality TV show. Yes. A reality show. Somewhere nearby, a film crew led by a man named Sandy (Prakash Belawadi) has been orchestrating the terror to record “real human fear.”
You know your film’s in trouble when the supernatural angle gives way to a subplot that sounds like it was written during a Red Bull–fueled editing session. The crew’s plan? Scare random bus passengers, film their breakdowns, and sell it as entertainment. The ethics? Nonexistent. The logic? Less so.
Sandy is a director so sleazy that he makes Harvey Weinstein look like Mr. Rogers. He tries to assault the actress playing a fake witch in his show, gets beaten senseless for it, and later wakes up next to a burning tent. The crew begins dying one by one because—surprise!—the ghost haunting the mansion is real. It’s like The Truman Show meets The Conjuring, except both directors quit halfway through.
The Ghost: Mayamma, Patron Saint of Overexposition
At this point, we finally get a flashback (because apparently 90 minutes of chaos wasn’t confusing enough). Enter Mayamma, a laborer from the past whose life story could’ve been its own movie. She’s married young, loses her child to a vulture (yes, an actual vulture), and then gets tortured and murdered by her family. Naturally, she returns as a vengeful spirit because honestly, who wouldn’t?
Her ghost is said to haunt the forest, the mansion, and, apparently, the entire logic of the film. She’s supposed to symbolize injustice, pain, and female rage, but in practice she mostly just flickers in and out of scenes like a forgotten Zoom participant.
The Music: When in Doubt, Sing About It
And then there’s Doori Doori. A haunting melody about lost souls, sorrow, and… honestly, who knows. It pops up whenever the cast runs out of dialogue, which is often. The characters take turns singing it while possessed, like a demonic karaoke session. By the fifth reprise, you’ll be begging Krampus, the Bunyip, or anyone else from the 2016 horror lineup to drag you to hell for mercy.
The Climax: Fire, Explosions, and Existential Hangovers
In true “we ran out of budget” fashion, the movie’s climax is a chaotic mix of screaming, burning tents, and spiritual mumbo-jumbo. The crew dies. The ghost maybe wins. The survivors stumble out of the mansion at dawn, dirty, traumatized, and visibly unsure if the script ever explained what just happened.
Sandy and the channel manager wake up near a river, probably regretting all their life choices. The bus driver Tanka, who was in on the prank, just sort of gets up. Everyone lives, dies, or maybe exists in a metaphorical purgatory—it’s impossible to tell.
The Cinematography: Gorgeous Confusion
To give credit where it’s due, Last Bus looks great. The forest scenes are atmospheric, the lighting is eerie, and the camera work makes you believe you’re watching something profound—right up until someone opens their mouth and ruins it. The cinematographer, Ananth Arasu, even won a state award for his efforts, presumably for managing to make sense of the chaos through sheer aesthetic willpower.
But beautiful visuals can’t hide the fact that the plot moves like an actual bus in Bangalore traffic: slow, unpredictable, and prone to veering into random lanes.
Final Verdict: 3/10 — A Bus Ride to Nowhere
Last Bus wants to be profound. It wants to make you question life, death, fear, and the ethics of reality television. Instead, it makes you question your Wi-Fi connection because you keep pausing it to Google, “What the hell is happening?”
It’s half ghost story, half found-footage satire, and all mess. The acting ranges from decent to “please let Krampus have this one,” the script reads like a fever dream written on the back of a bus ticket, and the moral of the story seems to be “never board public transport without a crucifix.”
Yes, it’s ambitious. Yes, it’s stylish. But like the titular vehicle, Last Bus runs out of gas long before it reaches its destination.
If you enjoy psychological horror that makes no psychological sense, this is your movie. Otherwise, save yourself the trip. Because once you board this cinematic bus, there truly is no getting off until it crashes—right into your sanity.
