Review: Waagh (2025)

Mukti Krishan’s short film Waagh begins with an intrusion. A leopard, straying into the manicured order of a redeveloped apartment complex, unsettles its inhabitants for a moment before meeting its end. When the lifeless leopard is later taken away, the event is quickly absorbed into adult routines. It is treated as a minor disruption in the endless machinery of urban life. For the adults, it is a spectacle. But for Apu, an eight-year-old boy, the encounter leaves a residue, a corrosive disturbance that refuses to dissipate. In his inner world, something has broken, and the narrative thrives in that fissure. As his perceptions tilt, reality and imagination dissolve into one another, not in the manner of fantasy but as a slow distortion, the way light bends in water. 

Apu is visibly shaken by the leopard’s intrusion and instinctively seeks comfort in his mother. Yet her attention is elsewhere, and the film captures this absence of maternal refuge with quiet precision — the moment a child realises that the adult world has little patience for his fears. His isolation deepens as he travels with his schoolmates, their idle gossip giving way to taunts. They mock his timidity, a cruel inversion of his dread. One of the film’s most striking passages is a dreamlike sequence in which Apu imagines the predator not roaming the forest but lodged within his protective surroundings. The terror ceases to be external. It becomes intimate, inescapable. What emerges is a delicate portrait of how quickly trauma mutates into self-consciousness. How ridicule and neglect can so easily reshape the contours of childhood. There is a rare sensitivity here to the fragile speed with which fear transforms a child, and to the desperate, almost primal effort with which he clings to the remnants of his innocence. The apartment complex itself, with its restless appetite for expansion, becomes complicit in the boy’s growing paranoia. 

What is most striking about Waagh is its refusal of spectacle. Krishan crafts a world of silences, closed doors, and watchful gazes, allowing paranoia to seep in not through plot but through atmosphere. The apartment complex itself, with its restless appetite for expansion, becomes complicit as a landscape where instinct is suppressed but never erased. The film connects viscerally because of its tender, confident touch and the filmmaker’s ability to draw a remarkably layered performance from the child actor, Arjun Amdekar. Vandita Jain’s cinematography amplifies this mood. The camera does not chase action but lingers in confined spaces, where menace and stillness coexist uneasily. The sound design by Abhro Banerjee and Bigyna Dahl deepens this atmosphere, carrying an eerie resonance that unsettles even in silence.

Waagh is not a film of resolution. It is an experience that inhabits ambiguity, where a child’s state of mind speaks louder than anything spoken aloud. What unsettles us most is not the intrusion of the wild into the city, but the reminder that the wild has always lived within us, waiting for the smallest crack to resurface. It had its world premiere at FrightFest on August 24, a fitting stage for a film that treats horror not as spectacle but as an intimate fracture in the fabric of ordinary life.