Masooda is the kind of supernatural horror movie that makes you realize evil spirits aren’t the real enemy—runtime is. Written and directed by Sai Kiran and praised by critics and audiences like it cured seasonal depression, this 2022 Telugu horror film feels less like a haunting and more like someone read an entire family’s generational trauma into a PowerPoint and then hit “slideshow” for two and a half hours. Yes, it’s ambitious. It’s also cluttered, exhausting, and unintentionally funny in all the wrong places.
Three Timelines, Zero Chill
The film unfolds across three different time periods—1989, 1999, and 2022—because apparently one cursed era just wasn’t enough. We start in 1989 with sugarcane fields, mysterious women, and brothers being dragged into a ruined bungalow like it’s a pre-Internet HR meeting with Satan. Then we jump to 1999, where Mir and Nargis are waving divine blankets and daggers around a building full of people acting “insane” (aka standard horror possession mode).
By the time we get to 2022, you’re already juggling names like Mir, Faizal, Fardeen, Khaja, Nargis, and Masooda like you’ve accidentally signed up for a family tree exam. The structure wants to feel epic, but it ends up feeling like three different horror movies duct-taped together with exposition and flashbacks that refuse to end.
Neelam, Gopi, and the Apartment of Constant Suffering
In 2022, we meet Neelam and her daughter Nazia, living in an apartment behind the building where a woman was murdered. Because of course they are. Neelam’s estranged husband Abdul pops in occasionally to be abusive and greedy, like a legally mandated toxic-relative subplot. Their only ally is Gopi, the nice-guy software employee who spends half the film trying to help Nazia and the other half trying to reschedule his love life around demonic events.
This could have been an intimate, character-driven haunting. Instead, Neelam and Gopi become supporting actors in a movie that’s deeply in love with its lore, its flashbacks, its chadars and daggers, and its never-ending narration about who sacrificed whom in which decade. Neelam is supposed to be the emotional anchor, but the script gives her very little time to actually be a mother; she’s too busy running between hospitals, exorcists, and flashback revelations like a supernatural project manager.
Nazia: Honor Student of Overacting Academy
Poor Nazia. One minute she’s a struggling student with a bracelet and some attitude, the next minute she’s chewing on garbage and snarling her way through the building like a demon auditioning for a soap opera. The possession scenes are loud, repetitive, and about as subtle as a jump-scare compilation on fast-forward.
Every time Nazia goes feral, the movie cranks the volume, contorts her body, and has her hurl insults or threats while the adults stand around looking shocked and helpless, again. It’s scary the first time, tiring the fifth time, and unintentionally comic the tenth. By the time she’s tossing people, stabbing Gopi, and flexing demonic strength, you start to suspect the real haunting is the film’s commitment to recycling the same beats.
Gopi: Nice Guy, Horrible Life Choices
Gopi is set up as the earnest software engineer-next-door, complete with office crush Mini and a Goa trip that exists purely so he can cancel it for “emotional stakes.” He helps Neelam, freaks out, abandons her, regrets it, comes back, travels to Chittoor, uncovers family secrets, brings back artifacts, participates in rituals, and still somehow has to explain all this to Mini like it’s just a slightly weird week.
At some point, Gopi stops being a character and becomes a plot courier: pick up lore from Chittoor, deliver to Hyderabad, pick up chadar and dagger, deliver to climactic ritual. For a guy supposedly in a horror movie, he spends a remarkable amount of time looking like someone who got voluntold to lead an overlong team-building exercise at the world’s worst offsite.
Masooda: The Spirit Who Does HR for Evil
Masooda Bi herself, in theory, is a strong horror figure: a former black magic practitioner, human sacrificer, and corrupting force who destroys an entire family. In practice, she’s stuffed into so many flashbacks, legends, and monologues that she starts to feel less like a terrifying presence and more like a case study.
We get her manipulating Khaja, performing black magic, ruining villagers’ lives, sparking an affair, causing accidents, orchestrating sacrifices, getting stabbed, resurrected, buried, relocated, reconnected via bracelet, and then finally confronted again with chadar and dagger. She’s less “ancient evil” and more “recurring task in a cursed to-do list.” Every time her backstory gets re-explained, the fear drains out and the fatigue sets in.
Rizwan Baba and the Exorcists Union
No horror movie is complete without an exorcist, and Masooda gives us Rizwan Baba and his assistant Alauddin, who arrive with talismans, rituals, and plenty of lines about what can and can’t be done “at this time.” Alauddin’s initial “this isn’t real possession” verdict followed by a quick “okay, yes, this is definitely possession” sums up the film’s approach: hesitant, then overcompensating.
The exorcism elements are packed with rules, conditions, and steps: who has to attend, who has to be blood-related, when the bracelet can be removed, where the corpse is, what time the chadar must be placed, and which forest coordinates host the final showdown. It’s less like spiritual warfare and more like being given instructions to assemble a cursed IKEA wardrobe without losing any screws.
Lore Overload and Emotional Undercut
The film’s biggest problem is that it loves its lore more than its people. We get entire mini-movies inside monologues: Mir’s once-prosperous family, Masooda’s rise as a black magician, her affair with Khaja, the human sacrifices, the car accident, Mir’s decade-long hunt, the 1991 murder, the missing corpse, the buried body, the dagger and chadar stashed away like limited edition DLC.
All this might have worked spread across a series, but in a single film it smothers any real emotional connection. Neelam’s fear for her daughter, Gopi’s conflict between his life and his duty, Nazia’s lost childhood—all of that could have been powerful. Instead, those threads keep getting shoved aside so someone can explain the next stage of the Masooda Expanded Universe.
The Climax: Tree Falls, Logic Follows
The final act tries to turn everything up to eleven: falling trees, flying chadars, locked verandas, Abdul getting killed, Rizwan’s henchmen dying, Nazia on a murder spree, Gopi climbing trees while Masooda attacks, Neelam trapped and injured, rituals going sideways, and last-minute stabbings and coverings of corpses. It’s chaotic, noisy, and somehow still predictable.
Gopi stabbing the spirit, slapping the chadar onto the corpse, and Nargis removing the bracelet all play out exactly the way you’d expect. There’s no twist, no brutal cost beyond the already-spent runtime, and no genuinely haunting imagery to linger in your mind after it’s all over. The epilogue, with Gopi narrating everything to Mini and Masooda popping up again to haunt them, feels less like a chilling coda and more like the film whispering, “Sequel bait?”
Final Verdict: One Haunted Bracelet Out of Ten
Masooda clearly wanted to be a rich, layered, emotionally grounded horror epic. Instead, it’s a lore-heavy slog where every scare has to fight its way through walls of backstory, every character is secondary to the mythology, and every potentially powerful moment is buried under narrative clutter.
If you enjoy long-winded explanations, family trees full of doomed men, and demonic possessions that play like overcaffeinated drama club rehearsals, this might be your thing. But if you came looking for lean, unsettling horror with emotional punch, Masooda feels less like a nightmare and more like sitting through a very detailed, very loud, very haunted family history presentation you never asked for.
