Abhishek Jaiswal, Divya Khosla Kumar, horror, India, Indira Krishnan, Jatadhara, Jhansi Laxmi, movies, Naveen Neni, Pradeep Rawat, Ravi Prakash, reviews, Rupa Laxmi, Shilpa Shirodkar, Srinivas Avasarala, Subhalekha Sudhakar, Sudheer Babu, Venkat Kalyan
November 13, 2025
by Carla Hay
Directed by Venkat Kalyan and Abhishek Jaiswal
Hindi or Telugu with subtitles
Culture Representation: Taking place in an Kerala, India, the horror film “Jatadhara” features an all-Asian cast of characters representing the working-class and middle-class.
Culture Clash: A ghost hunter, who says he doesn’t believe in ghosts, fights a supernatural demon of greed.
Culture Audience: “Jatadhara” will appeal primarily to people who are fans of the movie’s headliners and people who don’t mind watch idiotic horror movies.
No horror movie fan should endure the sloppy and incoherent dreck that is Jatadhara. It’s a badly acted and tedious jumble of nonsense about a ghost hunter whose family legacy is tied to Dhanapisachini (a female greed demon), with tacky visual effects. Adding to the ridiculousness of it all are song-and-dance numbers that look very out of place.
Directed by Venkat Kalyan and Abhishek Jaiswal, “Jatadhara” was written by Kalyan. The movie has choppy film editing that makes this already messy story even messier. “Jatadhara” takes place in Kerala, India, where Malayalam is the official language. And yet, “Jatadhara” was filmed in Hindi and in Telugu. Don’t expect an explanation.
The movie’s main protagonist is Shiva (played by Sudheer Babu), a self-described ghost hunter, who says he doesn’t believe in ghosts. Shiva has a day job selling technology devices. Shiva has two sidekicks in his “debunking” ghost-hunting missions: Rajesh (played by Naveen Neni) and Janki (played by Jhansi Laxmi), a couple who get engaged during the course of the story.
The first half of “Jatadhara” drags with repetitive scenes of Shiva, Rajesh and Janki doing things like poking around caves and dark buildings with flashlights as they look for ghosts. In an early scene in the movie, the trio goes into a factory that is supposedly haunted by the ghost of the factory owner, who allegedly raped and murdered children.
Even though Shiva says he doesn’t believe in ghosts, strange paranormal things are happening to him. At night, he wakes up to find his bed levitating. He also has unexplained nightmares. In one of the nightmares, he keeps seeing a woman holding a knife over a baby in a crib, as if she’s about to kill the baby.
None of these scenes are terrifying and just highlight how fake the movie’s visual effects look. After Rajesh and Janki get engaged, the movie then has a horrible and abrupt shift to a song-and-dance scene at Rajesh’s bachelor party, where Shiva and a random exotic dancer do some “bump and grind” dancing.
Shiva gets a love interest named Sithara (played by Divya Khosla Kumar), an archeological researcher. Shiva and Sithara have their “meet cute” moment when she pepper sprays him because she mistakenly thinks he’s going to harm her. Later on, Shiva and Sithara are officially introduced to each other because Shiva’s mother Devi (played by Indira Krishnan) knows Sithara’s unnamed mother (played by Rupa Laxmi). During this re-acquaintance, Sithara tells Shiva that she’s sorry for using pepper spray on him.
Shiva finds out that his bizarre paranormal experiences are the result of a family curse that awakened Dhanapisachini (played by Sonakshi Sinha) because someone in his immediate family got greedy for gold and offered Shiva as a sacrifice when he was a baby. The other people in his immediate family are his parents Devi and Vasu (played by Ravi Prakash), Shiva’s aunt Shobha (played by Shilpa Shirodkar), and Shiva’s uncle Balraj (played by Rohit Pathak). Devi is Balraj’s sister. Supporting characters in the movie include ghost hunter Manish Sharma (played by Srinivas Avasarala), priest/pandit Neelkanth Shastri (played by Subhalekha Sudhakar) and an unnamed tantrik (played by Pradeep Rawat).
Much of the last third of “Jatadhara” has long-winded flashback scenes of the events that led up to the family curse. It’s a chaotic mishmash of people chanting rituals while sitting on a pentagram; a shrieking Dhanapisachini swooping around the room, as she sticks out her tongue and waves her arms around to try to scare people; cattle being sacrificed as part of the ritual; and people occasionally getting demon-possessed and doing things like licking blood off of the floor. Most of it looks silly instead of scary.
It all leads to an inevitable showdown between Dhanapisachini and Shiva, who obviously has to rethink his disbelief in ghosts. The movie’s characters and dialogue are very shallow, while the terrible acting makes everything worse. The only people who should be horrified from watching “Jatadhara” are the people responsible for making this embarrassing flop.
Zee Studios released “Jatadhara” in U.S. cinemas and in India on November 7, 2025.