Ek Thi Daayan 2013

Bobo, Emraan Hashmi, is India’s top magician, a dazzling star whose public brilliance masks a life spiraling toward collapse. Unknown to his beautiful girlfriend Huma Qureshi Tamara, he is haunted by hallucinations of his dead little sister Sara Arjun Misha, casting a long shadow over every show. To quiet the storm inside, he days away with life’s bright lights and seeks help from the eccentric Dr. Palit, Pavan Malhotra, who uses regression hypnosis to travel back to the distant past—back to a time when Bobo was 11 and Misha was 6. From this troubled childhood, a terrifying story begins to surface: a dark supernatural power, a daayan, enters their world.

A mysterious woman named Diana, Konkona Sen Sharma, moves into the building after Bobo’s descent into “hell” via the elevator. She charms Bobo’s father and begins to babysit the children, while the paranoid performer clings to his belief that she is a witch. On Diana’s birthday, during the night of the red moon, she lures the kids into a game of hide and seek with a grim goal: to sacrifice Misha and restore her dark powers. When Bobo peeks out from his hiding spot, he witnesses a tragedy: his father returns, the door is broken down, and Misha lies lifeless in the trunk while a now undisguised Diana looms over her body. Enraged, the father lunges at Diana, but she kills him with a suffocating scream. Diana moves toward the window to complete her ritual, yet Bobo discovers his father’s dagger and severs Diana’s ponytail. She crumbles into dust but not before revealing that everything she did, she did for him and promising to return.

Dr. Palit attempts to dismiss the visions as fantasy, and Bobo clings to the same doubt. After a public outburst at a restaurant, he is knocked unconscious and hospitalized, where Tamara learns more about his hallucinations. He asks Tamara to marry him, and they later adopt ten-year-old Zubin, hoping for a fresh start. Their fragile happiness endures until Lisa Dutt, Kalki Koechlin, bursts into their life during a magic show, unleashing Bobo’s deeper fear that the daayan has reentered their world. To his surprise, everyone around him adores Lisa—she even buys his old house, which only intensifies his unease. The tension thickens as Zubin’s presence anchors the family’s safety, while Bobo’s subconscious screams that the daayan is back.

The moment of reckoning arrives at Lisa’s housewarming party when Tamara falls from a balcony. Tamara’s hospital stay deepens the mystery, and when she recovers, a tense confrontation with Lisa follows. Dr. Palit urges a deeper search for the truth, and soon the trail grows darker: Palit is found dead, and a menacing lizard lurks nearby. Rushing to the exhibition where Zubin should be, Bobo discovers the boy is missing and returns home to find the house deserted. He descends into the elevator—into hell itself—and discovers Zubin on a sacrificial altar, while the daayan readies a final sacrifice to sustain her powers. Bobo learns that Tamara is the daayan, and the revelation is compounded by the fact that no one would push ordinary buttons in an elevator to reach hell—Bobo himself is a pishaach, a demon, awakened by the red moon.

A furious battle ensues. The daayan—Tamara in disguise—refuses to bow to him, but Bobo taps into ancient knowledge from a book on black magic, and the power granted by the red moon surges through him. He faces Tamara, seemingly killing her, then hands his powers back to Satan. When Diana reappears in her true form, she asserts that only the pure can kill a daayan; since Bobo killed her as a child, innocence has faded from him. She attacks with her hair—the source of her strength—but a determined Bobo, with Zubin’s aid, manages to sever Diana’s ponytail using the sacrificial dagger. Diana crumbles again, promising to return.

In the quiet that follows, Zubin asks whether all of this was magic or witchcraft. Bobo replies that everyone carries a blend of both. In a final, intimate moment, he meets Lisa at a cafe and reflects on the earlier aggression toward her. The screen fades to black as Bobo confides, “I thought you were a daayan.”