Barbie
2021 · 11m · India
Directed by Debjoy Chakraborty
A young man named Sayan forces his way into a house in search of a missing girl and uncovers a spine-chilling truth about Ratri Mukherjee. A single-location Bengali horror short that turns the innocuous title against itself.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Taking a toy brand name and burying it in Bengali domestic horror is exactly the kind of subversive move that makes consensus critics squirm—Chakraborty knows the title's innocence is the whole joke, and he weaponizes that dissonance until it breaks.
The single-room constraint and escalating interrogation recall a lineage of Hitchcockian confined-space thrillers, though the film's cultural specificity and restraint in pacing suggest a more contemporary rigor than mere homage.
The decision to keep the camera tethered to Sayan's perspective in that claustrophobic space—never cutting away to explain or contextualize—turns tension into something tactile; it's a formal choice that makes low budget feel like intention.