99 min | PG-13 | September 22, 2023 | Neon
A first-generation Indian-American teenager wants to be normal so badly that she shatters the jar holding her old friend’s demon. The thing she sets free feeds on isolation. She gave it a buffet.
Samidha is a high schooler caught between two worlds. She goes by Sam, dyes the cultural specifics out of her life, and keeps her distance from Tamira, the classmate who carries a jar everywhere and talks to herself. When Sam smashes the jar in a moment of cruelty, she releases a Pishach, a demon from Hindu folklore that devours its victims through loneliness. The horror is real, but the film is about assimilation as its own kind of haunting. Sam spends the movie running from the parts of herself she buried, and the monster is the bill coming due.
Megan Suri plays Samidha with a brittle defensiveness that reads as teenage embarrassment before it reads as guilt. She makes Sam unlikable in the early scenes on purpose, then earns the turn back toward her own family and faith. Neeru Bajwa plays her mother Poorna as a woman who sees her daughter pulling away and refuses to soften the friction. Their kitchen arguments carry the weight the scares sometimes lack. Mohana Krishnan plays Tamira as a haunted girl already half-consumed, and Betty Gabriel plays the teacher Joyce with a watchfulness that curdles into dread.
Bishal Dutta directs his first feature and co-writes the script with Ashish Mehta. He keeps the Pishach offscreen for long stretches and stages its presence through sound. The creature announces itself with a low industrial growl and a draining of color from the frame, so the dread arrives before the thing does. Dutta shoots the suburban interiors in warm light and then floods the demon’s spaces with a sickly black void that swallows the edges of the image. The technique is confident. The script around it leans on standard creature-feature beats that telegraph where the danger waits.
The cultural specificity is what gives the film its charge. A Hindu prayer becomes a weapon. A mother’s faith becomes the thing that saves her daughter. Dutta understands that the most frightening idea here is a girl so ashamed of where she comes from that she nearly erases herself. The monster mechanics are familiar and the third act resolves on schedule, but the central metaphor holds. This is a debut that knows exactly what it is about even when it does not know how to surprise you.