Vikram Bhatt returns to a familiar zone of misty corridors, cursed houses and doomed secrets with Haunted 3D: Echoes Of The Past, a Hindi horror thriller starring Mimoh Chakraborty and Chetna Pande alongside Shruti Prakash, Gaurav Bajpai, Praneet Bhatt and Hemant Pandey. Presented by Anand Pandit, produced by Anand Pandit and Rakesh Juneja, and released in cinemas on June 12, 2026, the film tries to extend the legacy of Bhatt’s earlier 3D horror grammar into a new haunted mansion narrative. Naren A. Gedia handles the cinematography, Kuldip Mehan edits the film, and the music is credited to Prateek Walia, Nayeem Shabir and Puneet Dixit. On paper, the ingredients belong to a recognisable mainstream horror tradition where guilt, romance and supernatural punishment collide. On screen, Haunted 3D: Echoes Of The Past is a laboured, awkward and painfully dated exercise that mistakes loudness for fear and melodrama for emotional depth.
Haunted 3D: Echoes Of The Past: Plot
The film follows a man who seeks refuge in a remote Indian mountain mansion while running from his past. The mansion, as expected, carries sinister secrets of its own. What begins as an escape soon becomes an imprisonment, as the house reveals itself to be a space of terror, memory and torment. The central idea is simple and serviceable. A person haunted by personal history enters a place that physically manifests dread, and the supernatural becomes an extension of guilt.
That premise could have delivered an atmospheric horror drama if the screenplay had trusted silence, suggestion and psychological tension. Instead, the film moves with the blunt predictability of a haunted house ride. Doors creak, faces appear, characters stare in horror, and the background score repeatedly tells the audience how afraid it should be. The story does not unfold as a gradual descent into dread. It arrives in chunks of exposition, staged revelations and overwrought emotional beats.
The past, which should have carried tragic force, feels more like a convenient file of plot information. The mansion never becomes a genuinely disturbing character in the drama. It remains a decorated backdrop where scares are placed at regular intervals. The romance and pain embedded in the narrative also fail to gain weight because the film rushes toward supernatural spectacle before establishing believable human stakes. Horror needs consequence. Here, consequence is announced more often than felt.
Haunted 3D: Echoes Of The Past: Performance
Mimoh Chakraborty has the demanding task of anchoring a story built on fear, guilt and emotional vulnerability, but his performance rarely finds the necessary inner life. He often appears physically present but emotionally distant from the crisis around him. Horror acting requires a convincing progression from disbelief to panic to psychological exhaustion. Mimoh’s reactions remain too stiff and repetitive, making it difficult to invest in his character’s turmoil.
Chetna Pande fares slightly better in terms of screen presence, but the writing does not give her enough complexity to shape a memorable part. She is asked to carry heavy emotional material, yet the scenes around her are written with such exaggerated dramatic pressure that sincerity becomes difficult to sustain. Her performance tries to reach intensity, but the film keeps pushing her into moments that feel theatrically forced rather than haunting.
Shruti Prakash, Gaurav Bajpai, Praneet Bhatt and Hemant Pandey move through the film’s supernatural design without being given sharply defined arcs. The supporting characters function mostly as pieces of the larger haunted mansion machinery. They react, warn, suffer or explain, but they seldom feel like people with lives beyond the frame. This weakens the ensemble because horror becomes more effective when every face in the room carries some recognisable fear, desire or secret.
The larger performance problem is tonal confusion. Some scenes demand straight faced terror, others drift toward camp, while a few moments become unintentionally funny because of the combination of strained dialogue and excessive staging. The actors are not helped by a screenplay that confuses shouting, trembling and staring with genuine terror. Fear cannot be manufactured only through reaction shots. It has to grow from believable behaviour, and that foundation is mostly missing here.
Haunted 3D: Echoes Of The Past: Analysis
Vikram Bhatt’s direction leans heavily on elements that once defined a certain brand of Hindi horror: gloomy interiors, tragic romance, supernatural vengeance, heightened music and 3D friendly scare staging. The issue is not that the film is old school. Classical horror can still be powerful when built with rhythm, mood and formal control. The issue is that Haunted 3D: Echoes Of The Past feels stale rather than classical. It brings back familiar devices without refreshing their emotional or visual impact.
The screenplay is the film’s most damaging weakness. It does not build suspense through behaviour or atmosphere. It explains, repeats and amplifies. Characters often speak in lines that sound designed to push the plot forward rather than reveal personality. The emotional beats are undercooked, and the horror beats are overplayed. This imbalance leaves the film suspended between a tragic supernatural romance and a jump scare driven spectacle, without succeeding as either.
Naren A. Gedia’s cinematography gives the mansion a polished, shadow heavy appearance, but the visual design rarely creates genuine spatial anxiety. A haunted location must have geography. The audience should feel how a hallway traps a character, how a room changes meaning, how darkness reorganises space. Here, the mansion is more ornamental than oppressive. The 3D element is used as a surface attraction rather than a deeper cinematic tool. Instead of pulling the viewer into dread, it often underlines how mechanical the scare construction is.
Kuldip Mehan’s editing maintains pace, but it rarely builds tension. Scenes are pushed toward quick impact, and the film does not hold moments long enough for unease to gather. The sound design and music are even more aggressive. They attempt to impose fear through force, but excessive sound often exposes weak staging. When every moment is treated like a climax, nothing feels truly climactic.
Thematically, the film gestures toward guilt, memory and the impossibility of escaping the past. These are fertile horror ideas, but the film handles them at the level of declaration. It wants to be about emotional haunting, yet it rarely allows emotion to breathe. It wants to scare, yet it rarely understands the patience that fear requires.
Haunted 3D: Echoes Of The Past: Verdict
Haunted 3D: Echoes Of The Past is a weak horror film because it never earns the fear or tragedy it keeps insisting upon. Vikram Bhatt knows this genre well, but familiarity works against the film here. Instead of confidence, there is repetition. Instead of atmosphere, there is noise. Instead of dread, there is a string of laboured scares that feel assembled from an exhausted manual of haunted house clichés.
Mimoh Chakraborty and Chetna Pande are trapped in material that gives them very little room to create emotional credibility. The mansion looks like it should hold secrets, but the film reveals them without suspense. The past is meant to echo, but what echoes loudest is the tiredness of the storytelling. For viewers who still enjoy loud, theatrical Hindi horror, the film may offer some surface familiarity and genre comfort. As a cinematic experience, however, it is dull, awkward and frequently cringe inducing, with neither the craft nor the conviction to make its supernatural drama land.
Haunted 3D: Echoes Of The Past: Rating
Critics Rating: 1/5
Box Office Rating: 3.5/5
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