Raaz 3: The Third Dimension

The movie features Bipasha Basu as the lead and antangonist along with Emraan Hashmi and Esha Gupta as main characters. The film is the third instalment in the Raaz series, which is a sequel to Raaz: The Mystery Continues in 2009, which itself was a sequel to Raaz in 2002. Bipasha Basu, who was a part of the first film of the Raaz series, made a comeback to the series after opting out of the second film.

Her career started to take a drastic toll when a debutant actress named Sanjana Krishna, received accolades and appreciation for her work. Suddenly, Shanaya seems forgotten and everybody only wants to work with Sanjana. Soon enough, Shanaya sees her career fading away and her envy slowly becomes craziness. She turns to black magic and makes it her aim to destroy Sanjana’s career and make her feel the pain of loss. The fact is, Sanjana is Shanaya’s estranged sister. Their father loved Sanjana more than Shanaya. So, due to jealousy, Shanaya hates Sanjana and decides to ruin Sanjana in several ways.

She seeks the help of her former servant, Sonu, a tantrik who helps her practice black magic and calls upon a black magician named Tara Dutt. She asks him to destroy Sanjana’s life and career. Tara agrees to help haunt and torture Sanjana until she becomes suicidal. He asks Shanaya to give Sanjana a black poison through a person she trusts. Shanaya convinces Aditya to do it for her. Although reluctant at first, Aditya agrees due to his love for Shanaya but soon he realises that what he’s doing is immoral.

Aditya, whose sympathy for Sanjana has now turned into love, leaves Shanaya and refuses to listen to her any more. To end Aditya’s and Sanjana’s relationship, Shanaya hatches a plan by befriending Sanjana in order to poison her which Aditya gets suspicious about. At a movie premiere, Shanaya reveals that she actually dripped a black magic spell on the chocolates she gave to Sanjana earlier. In the bathroom, Sanjana is attacked by a swarm of cockroaches, which is really a hallucination due to the black magic of the chocolates given by Shanaya. This causes Sanjana to remove her dress and run back to the party, thus getting her nudity exposed by the paparazzi and the people there. The public wrongly believes this to be a deliberate publicity stunt of hers, causing her career to be on the verge of being ruined. Aditya takes her to a hospital and finds out that Shanaya is behind it. Enraged, Aditya visits Shanaya’s house and damages her possessions, taking away the last bit of the poisonous water.

Agitated, Shanaya seeks Tara Dutt’s help again, wanting to kill Sanjana once and for all. Tara Dutt tells Shanaya that life and death are in God’s hands and that to fight God he’ll need her life force. He tells Shanaya that she has to have sex with him to enable Tara to become powerful enough to fight God, to which Shanaya agrees. At the hospital, with the help of the doctor and a priest, Aditya goes into the spirit world to fight Tara Dutt. A hard fight ensues and Aditya defeats Tara Dutt, rescuing Sanjana’s soul in the process. Back in the real world, Shanaya suffers physical damage as a result of the fight between Tara Dutt and Aditya and attempts to kill Aditya and Sanjana, only to meet failure. Aditya protects Sanjana from the defeated Shanaya, who vows that she will forever remain a star and commits suicide by pouring acid on her head. Later, the media lets Sanjana off the hook as they conclude her ‘publicity stunt’ was a result of a nervous breakdown she had due to stress.

The film ends with the moral that our love for others matters more than our love for ourselves.