The trailer for The Vvaan landed Wednesday night, and it's the first time Sidharth Malhotra and Tamannaah Bhatia have shared a screen together. Ektaa Kapoor's Balaji Motion Pictures is behind it, working alongside TVF and 11:11 Production, and this is the studio's next swing at the horror genre after Bhoot Bangla did solid business earlier this year.

The setup, going by the footage: Sidharth's character lies about not finding leaves for a Chhath pooja errand, using the excuse to slip away with a friend on a Goa trip instead. Tamannaah's along for the ride. Somewhere between the lie and the beach, the trio ends up in a village deep inside a forest, and that's where the plot turns. The village worships a forest deity called Vvaan Devi, and the trailer lingers on the community's hardships and its rigid superstitions around the woods. One rule holds the whole thing together, nobody sets foot in the forest after midnight. Someone, obviously, is going to.

Folklore With A Comic Twist

Director Deepak Mishra and writer Arunabh Kumar have packed several genres into one trailer, mystery, action, a dash of romance and comic relief courtesy of Sunil Grover and Maniesh Paul, who round out the cast. It's a tonal mix Balaji has leaned on before, using folk horror as scaffolding for a broader commercial film rather than a straight scare fest.

There's already a prequel out in the world. A graphic novel called The Legend of Vvan, credited to Alok Sharma and Saumin Patel, released a few months back and was built directly off material from the film's own creative team. So the mythology around Vvaan Devi didn't begin with this trailer, it's been seeded for a while, presumably to give the theatrical run a head start with anyone who picked up the comic.

The producing credits stack up too, Shobha Kapoor, Ekta Kapoor, Arunabh Kumar and Niraj Kothari, with Manu Anand handling production and visual direction. That's a fairly loaded crew for a film that's positioning itself as a mid-scale theatrical bet rather than a tentpole.

The Vvaan opens in cinemas September 25, landing in a month already crowded with Daayra, Haiwaan and the Mirzapur film jostling for the same weekend audience. Whether a forest goddess and a midnight curfew can cut through that traffic is the one thing the trailer doesn't tell you.