Haiwaan is out, and the reviews are not agreeing on much except the background score.

Priyadarshan's Hindi film, a scene-to-scene remake of his own 2016 Malayalam hit Oppam, has Saif Ali Khan playing Shyam, a blind maintenance manager in a Mumbai high-rise who becomes both witness and target after a judge in his building, Pradhan (Boman Irani), is murdered. Akshay Kumar plays Parshuram, the man behind the killing, a former convict wrongly jailed whose family died by suicide while he was locked up and who has now turned his grief into a revenge spree against everyone who put him there.

The two outlets that reviewed the film landed in very different places.

Koimoi was unsparing. Its review called the plot "immense potential" wasted by a script credited to Priyadarshan with Abilash Nair and Rohan Shankar that can't decide whether Parshuram or Shyam is the real lead. The review flagged loose threads everywhere, a maid's backstory involving a brother and an ex-cop ex-husband, a security guard who keeps mixing up names for laughs, a judge who never once meets his own secret daughter and no explanation offered for any of it. Koimoi rated Saif's performance as the film's strongest asset, calling him "completely in sync with his character," but found Akshay's turn as the beast of the title oddly flat, saying there's "nothing especially engrossing or wicked" in it.

The Free Press Journal saw a different film. Its review, headlined around the Oppam connection, called Haiwaan a faithful remake with better production value than the original and said the antagonist's character has been written with real heft this time. It went further than Koimoi on both leads, calling Saif's performance one of the best of his career, and adding that it holds up better than Mohanlal's in the original. Akshay's villainy got a compliment too, with the review saying his laugh "can surely give you nightmares." The publication's verdict landed at three stars, two and a half for the film with a bonus half-star for Saif alone.

Where both reviews agree: Ronnie Raphael's background score works, Pritam's soundtrack mostly doesn't beyond the track Rangiyara, and the late Asrani's performance as the society's security guard stands out among the supporting cast, which also includes Saiyami Kher, Shriya Pilgaonkar, Sharib Hashmi and Rajpal Yadav.

Both reviews also note this is Priyadarshan and Akshay's second collaboration in a matter of months, after Bhooth Bangla, and both suggest the experiment with a darker Akshay hasn't quite clicked the way the pairing might have hoped.

What's missing so far is any word on how Haiwaan is actually doing at the ticket window on its opening day. With reviews this divided, that number, due once Friday's first-day figures settle, will matter more than usual for where the film goes from here.