dir. Nidhi Reddy

When I first realized I was assigned to review an animated short, I admittedly flinched. Is this all made by AI? Should I expect something so goofy that it will be hard to construct any coherent thoughts? As a filmmaker myself, I am expecting to have a grip on how the DP was moving, how the talent smelled, the way they touched each other, how real the props felt, so I can orient myself when writing about a film. This challenge very quickly revealed itself as a gift. 

The fuzzy, soulful visual language of Rajas and the Wolf Girl made it clear that organic people stand behind this project. The storyline too is well constructed, to the point of resembling a fairytale. A young man, Rajas (Connor Pickens), is taking pictures at a Freak Show. The Circus Host (Rahul Kalyan) is displaying his various freaks, amongst whom is Wolf Girl (Elize Renner), a frizzy, lively, pink, feminine creature. The Circus Host also possesses Monster Juice bottled in many tiny flasks. By accident, the flasks break, and Rajas inhales a large amount of the potion. When he wakes up, he is Bird Boy—an enormous beak is now in the place of his mouth, and his hands are monstrously long and wiggly. He then reconnects with Wolf Girl on her off hours, and they have a honeymoon phase. But the effects of the Monster Juice are only temporary, and soon Rajas will go back to his regular shape. Will he still like Wolf Girl, who is bound to be a freak forever?

This is a tale of danger, where suspense is used wisely. Without words, we easily enter the emotional weather of the world Nidhi Reddy invited us to. A meticulous soundtrack by Willian Ryan Fritch takes us deeper into this tender reality of relationships whose foundations are unconventional. In a society dominated by constructs of desire, we might forget that attraction can be driven by forces other than what we’ve been brainwashed to recognize. The tenderness between Rajas and Wolf Girl is contrasted by the context of the setting they are in: a Freak Show. Would you stand by the one you love, in a world where common folk see them as disfigured? But hey, who draws the line between figure and dis-figure? 

In order to truly meet Reddy’s work, I had to send my sarcasm out the door. Sitting through a film with no (verbal) dialogue can be trying, especially in a time when content attacks you in a constant flow. But it is also rewarding. The playful aesthetic of the short holds space for an array of emotions that range from tragic, to terrifying, to comforting and joyful. Death is present, so is deformity, but also love and hope. Great care was packaged in this strange film, and we shall be keeping our eyes open for Reddy’s next moves. 

dir. Mahmuda Sultana Rima

Lok (dir. Mahmuda Sultana Rima) is a short, bleak look at the ways women are demonised within their communities. We see a mob of men, flaming torches and all, arrive at the house of an accused witch. They enter her home, searching for someone, and threaten, intimidate, and verbally abuse her. It’s a tale as old as time, and in many ways, Lok is timeless. We don’t see any clear link to the past or present in the home of the witch. This lack of temporal specificity reminds the viewer that this is an event that has taken place throughout history and, unfortunately, still takes place in the present. 

The power of Sultana Rima’s vision is in presenting the inherent idiocy at the heart of both misogyny and witch hunting. As the legacy of witch hunting globally reminds us, misogynistic patriarchal systems are willing to accept that women are at once powerful enough to harm communities but unable to defend themselves when attacked by an angry mob. This impossible dichotomy is not the only one levelled at women, but it is a pertinent example of how stupid patriarchy really is. Women have borne the brunt of this idiocy for centuries, through violence, oppression, and subjugation, and the figure of the witch has become emblematic of this. An accusation often levelled at the most vulnerable in societies, ‘disposable’ women have often been scapegoats, pressure valves for societies facing socioeconomic issues, and outlets for misogynist feelings of inadequacy. In tandem with the figure of the witch, folkloric tales have also highlighted women’s power, often framing them as the villain if they choose to embrace it. 

Sultana Rima describes Lok as a metaphorical tale blending horror and folklore, stating, “we wanted to highlight certain aspects of society through allegory — a world that exists somewhere between reality and imagination”. Lok manages this tension masterfully, drawing on recognisable aspects of witchcraft like the neat and tidy poppets we see at the end of the film, in tandem with a chant that reminds us of the widespread violence faced by women and children, not only across India, but also across the globe. As a feminist folklorist, horror podcaster, and fanatic, a film that blends horror, folklore, and social commentary will always impress me. Lok is no exception. In just three minutes, Sultana Rima creates an ominous, oppressive atmosphere that draws us into the world of the witch, a world of ostracization and violence, but also power. By the end of the film, this woman’s power is revealed, and it is delicious. 

However, Lok also draws our attention to the true horror of ongoing witch hunts in India, with national crime figures suggesting thousands of people, overwhelmingly women, have been murdered as a result of witch hunts in the last twenty years. This number is likely much higher, as many cases go unreported. Lok spares us from the visual of violence, but we are aware of the ongoing persecution the gang of men is perpetrating. Whilst we have seen a reclamation of the label “witch” (and an unfortunate commodification of it), women are still facing systemic, endemic levels of violence and abuse globally. Films like Lok remind us of this fact whilst also giving us a sense of satisfaction in the tale at hand.

For those of you interested in women-centred narratives about witchcraft in India, you can also check out Bulbbul (dir. Anvita Dutt), a film we covered as part of our Witch season, and one that also celebrates the folklore of vengeful women who refuse to let men get away with violence. 

dir. Lim Da-seul

Speaking on a panel in promotion of the film adaptation of his 2005 dystopian novel Never Let Me Go, Nobel Prize-winning author Kazuo Ishiguro addressed a question he had been asked for many years in regard to the book’s protagonists—three clones bred explicitly for the purpose of organ donation—why don’t they escape? 

Ishiguro’s response was this: “I was never interested in looking at that story… I’m fascinated by the extent to which people don’t run away. If you look around us, that is a remarkable fact. How much we accept what fate has given us.” 

A great many films in the ever-expanding female cannibal horror canon—from Mitchell Lichtenstein’s Teeth (2007) to Karyn Kusama’s Jennifer’s Body (2009) and Julia Ducournau’s Raw (2016)—use a woman’s consumption of male flesh as a compelling metaphor for total, titanic rebellion against societal constraint. Escape, for the female cannibal, is a dish served blood-hot: a reversal of gendered dehumanisation in which her male victim gets his turn, to use typically feminised language, as a piece of meat. South Korean filmmaker Lim Da-seul’s 2025 short film Tongue, however, ultimately forgoes the vengeful bloodbath. Instead, Da-seul appears to share Ishiguro’s preoccupation with resignation—with those who choose to stay.

The short centres on an unnamed protagonist: a bespectacled, clinically groomed young woman, clearly growing weary of her marriage. From the opening sequence in a barbecue restaurant, we are sensorially immersed in the skin-crawling overwhelm of her husband’s mansplaining. Extreme close-ups of his rambling mouth and her fatigued expression are soundtracked by ragged breath and a score that almost sounds like a warped female voice screaming. Glistening strands of spit fly from his mouth, and even when the barrage is briefly halted by his rude finger-clicking in her face, we are quickly subjected to his pointless diatribes. What should they order? And, more importantly, what would be the ideal choice to celebrate the evening’s planned attempt at conception?

It is during this appointment—comedically stilted and aggressively de-eroticised—that the inciting incident arrives. As her husband cartoonishly humps and gyrates behind her, our heroine stares listlessly at a heart-encircled date on the calendar. When he begins to muse aloud about whether they should reconsider their car insurance, her eyes flood with pure contempt. She pulls him close for a kiss—and violently bites off his tongue.

While cinematic cannibalism often conjures expectations of a practical-effects-heavy bloodbath, Tongue is notably restrained. The film’s aesthetic is clean and elegant, pleasingly reminiscent of Korean horror juggernaut Kim Jee-woon’s A Tale of Two Sisters, with its palette of sumptuous reds and greens, rendered almost sickly by a jaundiced colour grade. And yet, the film’s largely meticulous visual standard means that when they do come, moments of gore feel genuinely impactful and surprising. The film’s chic veneer is also intriguingly punctured by surreal, fantastical horror imagery, instances of which, on paper, might read schlocky, but contrasted with Tongue’s largely anesthetised atmosphere, align the film more closely with Yorgos Lanthimos’ weirdo suburban ennui than B-movie camp.

I suspect fans of Yorgos Lanthimos will be particularly attuned to the film’s deft teetering between violence and banality, with its denouement recalling the grotesque negotiations his on-screen heterosexual couplings so often endure in order to survive. In Lanthimos’ worlds, equilibrium is frequently restored only through bodily sacrifice—an eye removed, a rule obeyed to the letter, a self irrevocably reshaped so that intimacy can persist. Tongue gestures toward a similarly perverse arithmetic. Here, desire is not consummated through consumption, but through subtraction; the body altered, muted, made compliant enough for domestic harmony to resume.

An eye for an eye and a tongue for a…

And it almost looks a little bit like love.

dir. Vijesh Rajan & Yashoda Parthasarthy

Aakhri Ride (translated as The Last Ride) embodies the spirit of Rod Serling’s original Twilight Zone series more authentically than anything I have encountered in a very long time. Writing and directing duo Yashoda Parthasarthy and Vijesh Rajan have crafted a short whose self-assured political perspective and rock-solid genre filmmaking work in tandem to deliver a fully-realized, character-driven suspense story that is able to maintain its deep roots in the harsh realities of urban Indian culture while achieving a global resonance. 

The film stars Chandan Roy as Aman, a migrant ride-share driver in Mumbai working day and night under the abusive surveillance of his boss (voiced over the phone by Kartik Krishnan) in order to raise money for his younger sister’s dowry. When the groom’s family suddenly demands more money and threatens to cancel the wedding if they are not paid by the end of the night, Aman reconnects with old friend “Scam Raju” (voiced by Faisal Malik) and devises a plan to steal his boss’s taxi. The night turns into a nightmare when Aman’s final passenger (played by Dheer Hira) ends up being a Chudail, a demonic witch of South Asian folklore. 

After working for years as motion designers and VFX supervisors, Aakhri Ride marks Parthasarthy and Rajan’s directorial debut. The pair’s technical background is evident not just in how handsome the movie looks, but in how complete and dynamic it feels, even in the face of the logistical limitations typical of indie shorts. The stripped-down automotive set-up calls to mind Steven Knight’s 2013 road drama Locke, and like that film, Aakhri Ride is much more than the sum of its parts. Cold, suspenseful lighting, clever shot composition, and a moody, dissociative synth soundtrack turn what amounts to a series of phone calls, B-roll of city driving, and conversations next to parked cars into an expansive story that consistently punches above its weight, especially when it comes to nuanced social commentary. 

A lot of that nuance comes from Roy’s sympathetic turn as Aman. He’s a character whose resentment and forced attrition have broken neither his dignity, nor his desire to do right by others. Through coy smiles and strategically subtle deference to people with more power than him, we catch glimpses of who Aman was outside his current circumstances, understanding on a very immediate, human level what Mumbai’s nested structures of urban corruption have put him through. It’s a terrific performance, especially given how much ground Roy has to cover within the film’s twenty-ish minute runtime, and it serves as a reminder of how much more didactic and expositional the setup could have been. It would have been easy to make Aman a sad sack or noble to the point of corny naïveté, easy to over-explain looming specters like dowry-based gender violence or various regional social stigmas, or even to make cartoon villains out of the characters who are empowered by those institutional systems. Luckily, Roy, Parthasarthy, and Rajan commit to a much more organic, grounded tone. 

This organicness is one of the primary reasons Aakhri Ride reminds me so much of the original Twilight Zone. I don’t draw this comparison to call the film derivative, but rather to praise it for reaching a level of technical execution and political coherence that is sorely lacking from so much of contemporary cinema, especially in the west, and especially especially in the slew of revivals, spin-offs, and spiritual successors that have attempted to more directly take up the torch of those original five seasons. No matter the pedigree of the people involved, these attempts to ape the show have all failed, largely because the institutional bloat of corporate filmmaking means it’s virtually impossible to make ideologically cogent critiques within the film-as-product modalities the industry operates under. Not to mention the fact that the expectation of high-budget spectacle means it’s far too easy to get lost in visualizing a high-concept set-up and ruin the impact of an already on-the-nose situation (see virtually every episode of Black Mirror).

In this way, the original Twilight Zone’s iconic surreality has more in common with the experiential immediacy of black box theater or the haunting oration of a good campfire story than it does a typical TV show, especially when it comes to the series’ famous twist endings. Without wanting to spoil the film’s second half, Aakhri Ride honors and remixes this subversive spirit completely on its own terms, letting the story play out based on a logic animated by explorations of misogyny, solidarity, and the intersections between various forms of social oppression in a way that feels subtle, inevitable, and radical all at once. 

If there is a downside to the way Aakhri Ride explores these themes, it’s that the structure of its initial character beats, combined with the specifics of the film’s visual style, might give up the proverbial ghost for genre-savvy viewers before the narrative itself does. Again, without wishing to spoil anything, the film feels more like a crime suspense story than a typical horror movie, which may prove underwhelming to grislier horror veterans when all is said and done. Still, this doesn’t stop Aakhri Ride from being a legitimately refreshing genre short with a lot to say and a lot to offer, and the prospect of Parthasarthy and Rajan applying this level of precision to a full-length feature is thrilling for those invested in the political power of genre filmmaking.

dir. Malu Janssen

dir. Alexandra Hayden

Would you fuck the udder? That’s one of many questions Alexandra Hayden’s short film Wall Udder breeds. Unsatisfied couple Christine (Sawyer Fuller) and Adam (Kevin Grady) debate their decaying relationship beneath a perceived image of wealth: an udder screwed into the wall. Yes, you read that right. 

Satirical and absurdist, Hayden toys with surrealism and the body, commodifying the grotesque and juicing our natural unease without cutting anything open. Bloodless and illusorily normal, this isn’t swollen with gore and shadows. Hayden deviates from genre, exaggerating cringiness, invasion of privacy, and relatability. For traditional horror fans, in Wall Udder’s favor, it’s not shy of bodily fluid. 

We start with Christine’s intense, sleepless state before accusing Adam of smelling like someone else’s milk, a promised cheating scandal that unravels away from cliché. She flicks the kitchen light onto a millennial-gray apartment and their spotlit 2% milk udder, plump and blushed at the teats. An argument ensues, and lines are delivered with teary eyes despite the farcical point-of-view shots of the udder, a third in this doomed throuple. 

There is something horrifying about watching an adult drink milk straight, an act left for cartons in school cafeterias, and an immediate red flag (I have made exceptions, and am since single).Wall Udder advances with Adam’s erotic and awkward sucking of the udder to prove his commitment. But what is it about drinking milk that feels unnatural? 

Viewers instinctually categorize characters based on their consumption, from rugged whiskey to sexy cosmos. With infantilizing boy-gangs in A Clockwork Orange (1971) and Inglourious Basterds’ (2009) prelude to slaughter, milk is a crux of cinematic villainy. Together with Allison Williams’ deconstructed cereal scene in Get Out (2017) and serial killer Anton Chigurh’s sweating bottle in No Country for Old Men (2007), this is a family dinner I would not want an invite to. 

But the couple in Wall Udder aren’t sinister, so what happens when milk feeds? Con artist Abagnale’s request for a glass after hitching a plane ride in Catch Me If You Can (2002) is a comfort for his hidden youth and immaturity. For the plagued scientist in Frankenstein (2025), it’s a product of his unresolved childhood, and a cyclic act of nurturing himself while trying to nurture his monster impossibly. Milk as assassin adopts orphaned Natalie Portman (Léon: The Professional, 1994). Milk as eternal youth (Snow White and the Huntsman, 2012). Milk as mommy (literally). Milk as daddy (sexually). Milk as famished. Milk as humanity. 

Perhaps these less evil interpretations can make a home for Hayden’s debut. How is Wall Udder subverting our expectations while forcing us to reflect on our own ridiculous, curdling desires? When fighting, Christine tells Adam that, despite their milk being creamy and perfect, it sickens her. Christine wanted oat milk; she wanted something different.

Their talk is interrupted by a jarring robber with a waddle and crooked mask, lured by the udder’s ominous lullaby. The udder’s wiggling to a soft piano as Christine falls into hysterics amplifies the scene. For Adam, “it’s the only thing holding [their] relationship together.” The false symbol of prosperity. The act of drinking the udder is more aligned with milk in Rebel Without A Cause (1955), where James Dean’s consumption contrasts his desire for comfort and nourishment with the ferocity of racing. Christine and Adam confront the neglect in the life they bought.

The udder is not pure at all. It is manufactured, packaged, and hooked up to wires. It’s exploited and drained until it is crusted at the tips. Drinking the udder is an animalistic need. When Romy in Babygirl (2024) drinks a glass of milk ordered by her dominant lover, she is returning to carnal roots. Christine and Adam remain hungry for whatever else the udder can offer. If the udder is the ultimate sign of success, would you fuck the udder? Can eight minutes really dissect our hunger for nourishment that’s failed us? Am I doing too much? It’s an udder. And it’s cheesing. 

To play it short, Hayden deconstructed my horror expectations, leaving me spiraling about milk for 722 words. I laughed, I cringed, I often felt unmoored by the ridiculousness of its arc. However, I also felt the need to tell multiple people about Wall Udder immediately after watching, and if that’s not the point of cinema, why am I writing this? 

dir. Triparna Banerjee

Mony is housebound while her sister Dolly goes to work as a nurse. Mony, who has Down Syndrome, is typically alone, talking to herself (and to the audience). She wavers between speaking her sister’s praises and chanting “Dolly no, Dolly no” in an anxious loop, as if trying to stop her sister from committing acts of violence. We witness these acts in jarring bursts later on, and we can assume Mony has borne witness to horrors as well. Scenes eschewing chronological clarity indicate a history of abuse from her father, which Dolly has rescued her from. Our identification is largely aligned with the disabled Mony’s perspective, which is shown as complex, emotional, gestural, and poetic—her fear, her compulsion, her fractured understanding of her sister’s actions. In one scene, Dolly lovingly paints her sister’s nails in a gesture of care and calm, with sweet music scoring the scene—evidence that connection can still be forged amidst the wreckage of trauma, even when hostile memories of the past linger and frame these moments. Flashbacks of trauma, tensions in everyday life, struggles are ever-present. Haunting is treated as a metaphor relevant to the past and the future. We feel the entrapment, the grief, the sense of compulsion, all while life moves on around them, normative and insidious, bourgeois people trying to conceal and ignore the horrors lurking and festering in their midst.  The film is a collection of nails, polished playfully and bloodied mercilessly… at turns representing connection, threat, tragedy, and redemption, sometimes all at once. A film of impressions, fragments, and duration that uses sound, cinematography, and sparse language masterfully, with strong lead performances and hypnotic pacing, giving the viewer a glimpse into a fractured and jagged world ripe with alienation, claustrophobia, and hauntings.

dir. Aaradhya Dev Shandilya

Written and directed by Aaradhya Dev Shandilya, The Butcher of Thane opens with a dream of slaughter. What follows is a short film replete with complex ideas delivered with a deceptive simplicity, a slow-burning thriller that reminds me of nothing so much as a 21st-century Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde with a keen eye for the building blocks of Anthropocene melancholy—the minuscule stressors and bizarre tensions that make up our everyday life.

Rajat Barmecha stars as Atharv, a man seemingly disconnected from the world and from himself. He slouches through a boring office job, listens to true crime podcasts, and reads thrillers. Desperate for connection, he lives vicariously through “relatable” protagonists (who his friend John notes are all white women) by writers like Lisa Unger, author of The Stranger Inside. He’s matched in his love for the book by the fearless Saanchi (Sanjina Gadhvi), who has a wry sense of humor, a similar fascination with violent crime, and unfortunate taste in men. After she strikes up a conversation (Atharv is too afraid to), they hit it off. Unfortunately, Atharv’s exhaustion and chronic sleepwalking have evolved into a deadly paranoia, blurring the lines between reality and fiction while a serial killer stalks the streets of Thane. 

The cinematography is sharp and shadowy, with an excellent electronic score that’s equal parts driving and oppressive. When the slaughter starts, the aspect ratio narrows and the focus along with it. Rose-tinted goggles come off as hope is dashed as Atharv, like the viewer, sees red. Ultimately, for all its interest in modernity, The Butcher of Thane asks an age-old question: when the mundane meets the profane, who is sacrificed and who gets to watch?

dir. Daniella DeVinter

We can blame the Ancient Greeks for the etymology of that incendiary word, hysteria, though the Egyptians were the progenitors of the concept; the Greek term for uterus, hystera, is generally agreed to be the linguistic root. This is because history has regarded hysteria as a solely female condition – a madness entirely unique to women with wombs. 

The madness, according to the Greeks, lay in not wanting to use the womb. 

Daniella DeVinter’s Unwell Woman is haunted by hysteria, as entangled and bound by it as the film’s nameless protagonist (Lydia Makrides) is ensnared by her mother’s fate. Placed in the enticingly Gothic surroundings of a Cambridge library in 1979, we are introduced to our smartly-dressed protagonist as a haunting cover of Kate Bush’s “Wuthering Heights” plays in the background (“You say I killed you – haunt me then […] Drive me mad!”). She is bold, disruptive, and different from all the other students studying. Immediately likeable, if you can look past her questionable choice in pencil case, decorated with an eerie, turgid-nosed clown. To round off her study session, she has also elected to bring the most ostensibly haunted photograph of her mother she could find. 

And it was taken in that very same library…! 

Our protagonist has been so preoccupied with packing various pieces of spooky memorabilia that she has neglected to bring a pencil. She asks a faceless woman nearby quite politely for one; the woman hands her a pen. 

DeVinter’s student is reading Studies on Hysteria, by Josef Brueur and Sigmund Freud, which is a double act guaranteed to drive anyone to madness even if they weren’t heading in that direction anyway. The authors babble clinically in our ears as the protagonist works her way through the text and the library empties and day slides to night. She is alone in the dark – except Brueur and Freud hang over her shoulders like malignant shadows, trailing cigar smoke, dressed to the nines and critically narrating their predatory case studies of hysterical young women. They poke and prod at her, hissing diagnoses, and that is when the painting starts talking. 

The painting was not visible before, in case you were wondering. 

The painting’s subject, a morbid woman dressed entirely in black, chastises the protagonist for not using a pencil to take her notes, and as punishment, elects to tell her a tale of her past using the medium of charmingly animated stop-motion paper puppets. Perhaps this happens to all students foolish enough to deface Cambridge library property. Unlike our badly-behaved vandalistic protagonist, the painting tells a story of a girl who was purely, perfectly good.

Good in the eyes of a misogynistic, repressive society, anyway, aside from a secret passion for painting that she nurtured by moonlight. But even this incredibly mild vice could not continue once she married the monster in the bedroom, represented here by a suitably Freudian jack-in-the-box clown springing to attention in the marital bed. An abrupt switch to live action once more, as our dutiful wife attempts to escape the consequences of her wretched marriage. She slides open the horrible clown pencil case, an apparent family heirloom, revealing an innocuous-looking pencil. 

Then she steps out of her underwear, braces herself over the toilet, and stabs upwards. 

This is female mania as the Greeks had it first; denial of motherhood, of hostile occupation of the womb by an invading force. The painting’s narration tells us that the unfortunate artist failed in her desperate measures. Her botched abortion resulted in the young scholar who listens in horror as Freud and Brueur gloat at her side. You’re scaring me, she protests, but the painting will not be appeased. What’s scary is a monster that crawls in your cunt and fucks with your head! Madness and motherhood, inextricably intertwined. 

Mum? asks our protagonist, and the painting melts away to reveal a naked, snarling skull. 

Unwell Woman ends badly for our doomed protagonist. She was set up to fail – handed a pen when she asked for a pencil, provoking the painting’s wrath. Handed the weight of her mother’s suicide hanging above her. And some historical scholars claimed hysteria was hereditary, suggesting that it could be passed down from woman to girl-child like hair colour or skin tone. You say I killed you – drive me mad! 

Daniella DeVinter creates a compelling, tidy tale that is a delight to watch. The editing crosses from playful to menacing without ever venturing too far into camp, and the cinematography is polished and beautiful. Special kudos to James Tearing for an eerie score, and Penelope Whitehouse for her haunting animation. Unwell Woman is a confident indie film, and it deserves to be.

dir. Orzala

They say that when you boil it all down, there are a limited number of stories in this world, and that, as humans, we are compelled to tell them over and over again. Why do we do this? I don’t know, but having consumed thousands of stories in my life, I’m hard-pressed to disagree with that claim. It’s perhaps a strange compliment, then, to say that Orzala’s deeply emotional and compassionate short film 6.666…SCARS (SCARS for short) is one of those core stories. It is a film about a mother and a daughter who are trapped in a toxic cycle that is held together through disembodiment and the dissociative act of self-harm. In other words, it’s about scars. How we choose to see them, speak about them, and ultimately, heal through them. 

SCARS employs bold formal choices that serve to place the viewer in a high-intensity state, mirroring the painful and pressure-filled position of our main character, Divita, the daughter, played by Radhika Singla. We are brought into her story via the narrative device of a repetitive time loop. We watch as Divita moves from the bathroom, where she has just self-harmed, to the kitchen table, where she is further harmed by her own mother’s shame, until she is forced to return to the bathroom once more, and then the vicious cycle repeats. No matter her attempts to change things, her mother continues to judge her harshly for not conforming and for wanting to be a beauty queen, even though her arm is covered in “ugly scars.” The loop is broken, however, by a going downwards of sorts, a literal move to the basement, where we are confronted by the raw emotional pain at the center of this traumatic bond. Ultimately, the monster below rises up and, through her exposure, forces a breaking point between mother and daughter.      

At this point, I have a confession to make. I made this film. Well, obviously, I didn’t make this film. Orzala made this film. She directed, wrote, and produced it, but I have also told this story. My first narrative short was about a young girl who self-harms and is stuck in a toxic mother-daughter bond. I even have a recurring action in the film where the mother and daughter bang on doors to try and get each other’s attention, as we see repeatedly in SCARS. In my film, however, I start with the mother, instead of the daughter, anxiously staring into the bathroom mirror, trapped, as they both are, in their intergenerational cycle of shame. Of course, our cultural roots are not the same. My film sprang from my liberal Canadian heritage, and Orzala’s is rooted in her Indian army family upbringing. But while our lives developed quite differently thousands of miles apart, we nonetheless carry a shared story, an echo of each other’s pain.

So to answer the question I started with, I believe that both Orzala and I, and the many filmmakers who have come before us, share our “tiger stripes” and expose our monsters, because we all want to heal. What SCARS does so powerfully is point directly to the painful emotional cycles of self-harm that millions of people are going through all over the world. And not only does the film highlight the psychology behind it, but it also offers hope, light, and a way forward for those caught in the loop. In the end, this film shows us that we repeat because we are human and, instead of projecting judgment and shame, it asks us to hold space for hard feelings and repair.