Pari

• Pari was originally set for an October 31, 2017 release in Pakistan but got pushed back, finally opening in cinemas on February 2, 2018.
• Director Syed Atif Ali co-wrote the script with Muhammad Ahsan and cast newer leads Azekah Daniel and Junaid Akhtar alongside veteran Pakistani TV actors Qavi Khan, Rasheed Naz, and Saleem Mairaj in supporting roles.
• Critics were rough on it — The Express Tribune's Rahul Aijaz gave it 0 stars, calling it "a new low for Pakistani cinema" — though the reception wasn't unanimous: Pakistani entertainment site HIP rated it 7/10, praising the attempt to make a homegrown horror film at all.
• The title created built-in confusion: an entirely unrelated Indian horror film, also called Pari and released the same year, starred Anushka Sharma and was directed by Prosit Roy — different story, different country, same name.
• The film later found a second life streaming on Netflix.

The black-magic revival at the center of the story reads as an allegory for inherited domestic trauma — the mother's guilt-driven decision to defy her daughter's death becomes something that haunts and ultimately corrodes the family from within, externalizing damage the household won't name directly.

Pari's refusal to over-explain its supernatural mechanics may be a deliberate choice rather than a budget shortfall — the film leaves the exact nature of what's inhabiting the child ambiguous, suggesting forces operating outside any framework the characters, or the audience, can fully grasp.

The mother's choice to revive her drowned daughter through black magic — and the monstrous cost that follows — plays as a warning about how far grief pushes people past a line they already know not to cross, with the child's corruption serving as the price for refusing to accept death.

Pakistani horror film about a couple, Mehwish and Shehram, who move into a new house in the mountains with their young daughter, Pari — and watch her behavior curdle into something wrong almost immediately. The twist: Pari already drowned in a swimming pool a year earlier while her father was working abroad, and her mother, unable to accept the loss, brought her back using black magic. What returned isn't fully their daughter anymore. Director Syed Atif Ali plays it as a domestic-horror slow burn rather than a jump-scare reel, building to a climax where Shehram tries to drive out the evil spirit through prayer — and the family pays for the mother's black-magic bargain either way.