The social life runs on a choreography of etiquettes — the small rituals, polite nods, and shared rules that keep our interactions predictable. Yet, it only takes a single rupture — a disaster, a death, or an unexpected intrusion — for that careful order to dissolve. When the familiar is shaken, upholding the theatre of civility becomes secondary to a a more primal instinct. It is in this space, between the mask and the animal beneath it, that Mukti Krishan’s short film, 'Waagh', situates itself.
Set in Mumbai — the only metropolis in the world where a forest lives inside its boundaries — Waagh begins with the sudden arrival of a leopard in a newly redeveloped apartment complex. Its appearance is unsettling but short-lived; before long, the animal is found dead. For the residents, it is a curiosity; a story to be passed around until it fades from conversation. For eight-year-old Apu, it is a fracture.
"I always knew Waagh needed to live in two registers at once: the tactile, sensory reality of Mumbai’s urban-wild overlap and the more internal,Mukti Krishnan
The short film borrows storytelling elements from psychological horror, tracing the way paranoia, fear, and a loss of safety can warp a child’s perception. Apu’s world grows strange in the aftermath. Small acts of cruelty — at school, at home, even in idle exchanges — begin to register with new weight. Reality blurs with imagination, and the once-familiar textures of daily life take on a quiet menace. Murti's lens keeps the scale intimate, but her narrative opens a space to consider the primal instincts simmering just beneath urban order. "Waagh isn’t a wildlife drama or a psychological thriller in the conventional way," she notes. " I was more interested in a tonal space where realism and unease could coexist without needing to be categorised. While the story contains an animal encounter, I was careful not to frame it with the heightened beats or spectacle you might associate with the genre."
In Waagh, the wild animal displaced by city sprawl becomes a symbol for the wildness we cannot domesticate, both around us and within us. Mukti draws from her own experience of a similar incident, when a leopard wandered into her apartment complex in Mumbai, recalling how WhatsApp groups buzzed with speculation, fear spread faster than facts, and civility gave way to something sharper and more instinctual. In choosing to filter this through the eyes of a child, she distills that sensation into its most raw form: the sudden recognition that the world is not as safe as you thought.
The film’s craft deepens this unease. Abhro Banerjee and Bigyna Dahal’s sound design along with Bhanu Dhande’s score is a key instrument, shaping an aural landscape that's a fertile place for fear. In contrast, the disruptive visual montages fragment the narrative, echoing the disorientation of Apu’s inner state. These devices bring the two sides of the story together, which was important for Mukti who insists that she didn’t want the allegory to sit on top of the realism like a separate layer. Rather, it needed to feel like something growing organically from the same soil.
Waagh has secured selections at two of the world’s most influential genre film festivals. It will make its world premiere on August 24 at FrightFest in London — the UK’s largest and most iconic celebration of horror and psychological thrillers, renowned for launching visionary voices onto the global stage. The film will then travel to Austin, Texas, for Fantastic Fest on September 18, the largest genre festival in the US, famed for its fearless programming and discovery of bold, boundary-blurring cinema.
As a work of thematic exploration, Waagh speaks to the delicate surface of urban life, where human and animal territories overlap in both space and temperament. It is skirts along the edges of the stories we tell ourselves to maintain a sense of control, and the speed with which those stories falter when the unexpected breaches our gates. In the end, the leopard’s death is not the real danger. The true unease lies in what it reveals: that beneath our cultivated order, something untamed waits — in the forest, in the city, and perhaps most disquietingly, in ourselves.
Follow Mukti here.
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