OK so let's talk about Vvaan, because I cannot stop thinking about this setup. Sidharth Malhotra's new film has him playing a man who is drawn, like physically pulled, toward something called Vvaan, and the question the movie keeps teeing up is whether it's just curiosity or whether something deeper is dragging him into a forest he's very much not supposed to enter. A forbidden forest! The most reliable plot device in human storytelling and I will never get tired of it.

The setup, as laid out over at MSN, is that Malhotra's character isn't your standard horror-movie dummy who wanders off the path for no reason. The film wants you to sit with the why of it. Is he investigating? Is he haunted? Is the forest, or whatever Vvaan actually is, calling him specifically? That ambiguity is doing a lot of work, and it's the difference between a thriller you forget on the drive home and one that itches at you for days.

And I love this for Malhotra specifically. This is a guy who has spent years in slick romances and actioners being charming at a very high level, and lately he keeps drifting toward moodier, spookier material. Watching a movie star chase a genre itch is genuinely fun. You can feel when an actor is actually interested in the material instead of just occupying it, and everything coming out about Vvaan suggests he's leaning all the way in.

Now, the forbidden forest itself. Why does this trope never die? Because it works, that's why. Humans have been telling some version of "don't go into the woods, and also you will absolutely go into the woods" since we were drawing on cave walls. The forest is the oldest threshold between the known world and whatever's past it, and every culture has its own version. So when a film builds its whole mystery around a stretch of trees you're not allowed to touch, it's plugging into something seriously ancient. The film knows it, too. The promotional material leans hard on the atmosphere: mist, silence, the sense that the trees are aware of you. Delicious.

But the more interesting thread, and the one the title of this whole thing is poking at, is the pull itself. Curiosity is a clean motive. Clean motives make boring movies. If Vvaan is smart, and I suspect it is, the pull on Malhotra's character is tangled up in something personal, a memory, a loss, a debt, something the forest knows about him before he knows it himself. Those are the horror-adjacent stories that stick, the ones where the scary place picked you specifically and was never random at all.

I don't want to spoil anything because the marketing has been careful about what Vvaan even is. Is it a place? A being? A word in a language the forest made up? I've read everything available and I genuinely could not tell you, and I think that's deliberate. There's a real pleasure in walking into a movie knowing only the shape of the mystery and not the answer, and we get to do that so rarely now, when trailers regularly give away the entire third act out of pure nerves.

So that's where I'm at. A big star, a foggy forest, a name that sounds like a whispered warning, and a question that the film refuses to answer up front. Whether it sticks the landing is a whole other thing, and genre movies like this live or die on the ending. But the ingredients are all there and the vibe is impeccable.

If you're into this stuff the way I am, keep an eye on it. And maybe go for a nice walk in some very ordinary, extremely non-forbidden woods this weekend, just to reset the baseline. Just me? Fine.