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sThis article looks at Uday Brahma’s Kannada short film 'Eater Eaten', a surreal meditation on mortality, impermanence, and the cyclical nature of life and death. Following a father, his daughter, and their cat on a fishing trip that turns into an encounter with Death personified, the film reimagines Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal through an Indian philosophical and theatrical lens.
Death is the only constant in human life, yet it is the one subject we consistently turn blind to. We treat it as an abstraction; a distant event; something that happens elsewhere and to others. Across cultures, we build habits, rituals, technologies, and entire belief systems to keep its presence at a manageable distance; playing catch up with the one opponent we can never defeat. This confrontation, that lies at the axis of our existence and our search for meaning, becomes the overarching theme of the homegrown Kannada short film 'Eater Eaten'.
Directed and written by Uday Brahma, the film follows a father, his young daughter, and their cat on a routine fishing trip. As they wait by the water for their catch, they encounter death personified.
It’s an approach that immediately recalls Ingmar Bergman’s 1975 film 'The Seventh Seal', where a knight returning from the Crusades is confronted by Death on a windswept beach, and wagers a chess game in the hope of delaying his end. 'Eater Eaten' adopts that framework but reroutes it through an Indian context, drawing from classical theatre and dance traditions to shape the physicality of its Death figure.
The film leans into surreal and philosophical horror to examine what it means to live in a body that is always moving toward its end. One of the its key ideas is the reversal of the eater and the eaten: humans who consume the world eventually become part of the same cycle they take from. The father and daughter's outing becomes a similar meditation on our origin from earth and our return into earth; on impermanence, ephemerality and the body as a book whose final page is inscribed with one word: death. The film deploys surreal, stark imagery, and an immersive sound design to evoke a moving version of the dance macabre: a ritualised medieval artistic and literary motif illustrating death's inevitability.
Through the figure of Death as an interlocutor, its suspension of time in the 'linear' way we experience it, its deep dark atmosphere of fantasy, and the body-horror vignettes illustrating the idea that the human body itself carries the imprint of its own ending, 'Eater Eaten' cerebrally spotlights the the buried anxieties we all share about the end.
Follow Uday here and watch the short film below:
