Thamma – Film Review

---

Still from Thamma

Thamma is the kind of horror film that makes you want to file a missing person report not for the characters, but for the script. What could have been a chilling reimagining of Indian folklore ends up as a confused, overproduced mess that mistakes noise for atmosphere and prosthetics for terror.

The film introduces Alok Goyal (Ayushmann Khurrana), a journalist who falls in love with Tadaka (Rashmika Mandanna), a mythical Betal trapped in a centuries-old curse. Somewhere between their blood-soaked romance and the supernatural war between Betals, headless monsters, and sect leaders, Thamma loses all sense of direction. What could have been a haunting mythology-driven story collapses into a glossy circus of bad CGI, recycled sound cues, and prosthetics that look straight out of a school play. The supposed creature transformations are laughably inconsistent you can almost see the glue lifting under the latex.

still from Thamma

There’s a moment early on where you think the film might find its footing, a promising cave sequence drenched in eerie blue light, a sense of dread building. But then it’s immediately undercut by yet another comic relief line, a pointless flashback, or worse, a romantic track that seems airlifted from another movie. Rashmika’s Tadaka, meant to embody centuries of pain, ends up reduced to a pretty costume and hollow dialogue. Ayushmann, visibly talented, looks lost like he wandered off the set of Article 15 and fell into a Marvel knockoff.

And that’s the real tragedy. Because Indian horror has so much mythological soil to dig from — Yakshas, Pretas, Chudails, Vetals, but films like Thamma flatten it into empty spectacle. There’s no tension, no world-building, no emotional core. Just prosthetic fangs, fake blood, and a desperate need to be “epic.” The horror genre doesn’t need bigger budgets; it needs conviction, texture, and truth.

It’s because of films like Thamma that India still isn’t taken seriously in the global genre space. While South Korea, Indonesia, and even Mexico are redefining horror through craft and cultural specificity, Bollywood is still trying to scare us with bad wigs and borrowed jump scares. Thamma wants to roar, but all it does is echo.

Verdict: A loud, glossy nothing. Proof that horror in India is still fighting its own demons and losing.