'Aakhri Ride' Is A Mixed Bag Of Classic Horror & Social Commentary

A former small-time thief struggles to make ends meet as an app cab driver in Mumbai. His employer abuses him whenever he takes a break or fails to find a ride. His mother and sister call from the village and ask for money he doesn’t have to pay his sister’s dowry. Desperate and out of wits, he falls back to his old ways and decides to steal and flip the cab he drives. After one last ride.

So begins Vijesh Rajan and Yashoda Parthasarathy’s short film ‘Aakhri Ride’. Over the following 24 minutes, Chandan Roy (whom many viewers will recognise as Vikas from Panchayat) delivers a stellar performance as the desperate driver Aman Kumar Yadav through the short’s many twists and turns. The radio play in the cab calls back to the nostalgia of listening to dramatised horror stories on dark nights of “load-shedding” or power cuts in 90s and early-2000s India and foreshadows the haunting last ride. The shadowy figure of the rider in the back seat harkens back to the familiar ‘churail’ archetype of yesteryear Hindi horror. With all these references and callbacks only halfway through ‘Aakhri Ride’, it feels like you’re all set for a delightful little horror short.

Sadly, that’s where all the good things about ‘Aakhri Ride’ end. Rajan and Parthasarathy have crammed too much subtext into a film too short to meaningfully engage with it all. In its 24-minute runtime, the film ticks through questions of gig-worker exploitation, India’s enduring dowry problem, the impossibility of escaping one’s past and poverty, the issue of women’s safety in nighttime public transport, abuse of power by the police, and the social stigma of being queer in India. This isn’t to say all these threads don’t come together by the time the credits roll. On the contrary, they come together too neatly; so neatly, in fact, that it ends up feeling like a moral play: the honest working man saves the day and receives his just reward.

The delightful setup of the first half also fails to pay off. Russian playwright Anton Chekhov famously wrote: “One must never place a loaded rifle on the stage if it isn’t going to go off.” In writing, we call this ‘Chekhov’s Gun’, a storytelling principle that states every element introduced in a narrative must be necessary, and any irrelevant details should be removed. Rajan and Parthasarathy have sadly failed to follow through on this fundamental principle. Even if one were to look past the awful blackface and the framing of a trans woman as the apparent monstrous other (which one shouldn’t in 2026), the reveal comes off as rather anticlimactic after the horror setup of the first half. It feels like a ham-fisted effort to keep the film grounded in social realism, rather than fully committing to the speculative horror framework several South Asian filmmakers have used in recent years to question social issues and gendered traumas. Despite the filmmakers’ best efforts, ‘Aakhri Ride’ begins with a hiss and ends with a whimper. If you’re in the mood for a scary movie, you will be much better off watching the old-school Hindi horror films it pays homage to.

Watch ‘Aakhri Ride’ here:

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