Indian Short Film 'Lalanna's Song' Unmasks The Quiet Terror Of Everyday Cruelty

There's something unsettling about Megha Ramaswamy's 'Lalanna's Song'. A Lynchian allegory masquerading as a straightforward slice of social realism, the film uses the visual language of the horror genre to unpack the quiet violence of everyday paranoia. At a taut 33 minutes, the short film unfolds with deceptive stillness — gradually revealing a world steeped in suspicion, control, and deeply internalised prejudices.

The story revolves around a brief encounter between two mothers — played by Parvathy Thiruvothu and Rima Kallingal — and a precocious child (Nakshatra Indrajith's eponymous Lalanna) at a birthday party. But what seems at first like a polite social visit soon unravels into an ambiguous but undeniably menacing power struggle. Lalanna, a child who is both gifted and othered, becomes a screen onto which the two older women project their fears and anxieties. Her voice — perhaps even her supernatural powers — becomes a source of both awe and alienation. Although Lalanna remains a cipher, the film uses her otherness to examine how society polices those it cannot classify.

"The themes and its complexity all melded into each other given the scope of the story," Ramaswamy says. "I wanted to tell a story about the female experience in a city like Mumbai, which is so faceted and layered in itself. The authenticity lies in its acknowledgement of all these themes, that eventually form its cumulative experience of tragedy and caution."

Ramaswamy's approach is both sensory and philosophical. She renders Mumbai not as a bustling metropolis, but as a haunted container of memory, violence, and muted resistance. The suburban house becomes a stage where the psychic wounds of women are acted out — through glances, silences, and conversations that never say quite enough.

At the center of this ambient unease is Lalanna — a spectral figure who seems too perceptive, too silent, too knowing. "Lalanna's presence is not just symbolic of girlhood, it's symbolic of survivors and victims," Ramaswamy says. "A lot of us find ourselves being pushed off the cliff quite literally. A few of us survive the fall. The angst is in the lament that the victim/survivor of this crime is never believed in spite of her repeated pleas. She is a character of mystery only because she speaks a truth."

As the film reaches its climax, Lalanna's song — her actual musical dirge — becomes a moment of metaphysical rupture, where all these emotional undercurrents crash into form. Ramaswamy and cinematographer Kuldeep Mamania create an atmosphere thick with dread and sensory detail, where the horror is not just aesthetic but moral. "I think the atmospheric quality of Lalanna's song was a very conscious decision we made as a team to represent small crimes in our age of abundance," Ramaswamy says.

The social prejudice and caste dynamics, while never explicitly named, are carefully etched into the fabric of this narrative. The discomfort one feels in the presence of another is subtly coded — through behavior and unspoken social cues. Ramaswamy, who has previously explored the emotional lives of girls and women with an empathetic lens (What Are the Odds, Newborns), brings the same sensitivity here, but lets discomfort lead. The maternal figures at the center of this story are not simply caregivers — they are also gatekeepers of social norms, capable of deep prejudice and fear.

"Horror as a genre allows space to explore all kinds of injustices and explicitly signify them as 'horror'," Ramaswamy says. "When women make horror, the gaze is very personal and we don't feel the need to make our stories moral science lessons for men to learn and engage with so they can do better by society."

"I am really fond of all kinds of horror films, particularly ones that offer good spectacles for audiences," Ramaswamy says. "That really helps drive the point home. Since I'm not a trained filmmaker, I have no rules when it comes to genre. I like a good mash-up as long as it feels truthful."

That truthfulness is exactly what makes Lalanna's Song so haunting: it reveals how the most terrifying horrors are the ones we already live with. Its narrative is not interested in easy resolutions and the film's ambiguity is its strength. Like a folk tale half-remembered or a dream you can't quite explain, it lingers in the mind long after it ends. In a cinematic landscape where horror is often loud and literal, Ramaswamy offers something far more disturbing: the quiet terror of everyday cruelty, masked as civility.

'Lalanna's Song' is currently streaming on Mubi.

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