Vikaari
2020 · 14m · Sri Lanka
Directed by Sandun Seneviratne, Charlie Bray
Tones: contemplative, dark, melancholic
In a Sri Lanka scarred by civil war, children begin to change in unsettling ways, and a community must face what the conflict has left behind.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone expects war trauma to be literalized—screams, blood, collapse—but Vikaari does something weirder: it lets the kids *become* the scar itself, turns metaphor into body horror. That's the kind of genre-splice that makes people uncomfortable in the way that matters.
The film's formal restraint—its refusal to sensationalize the supernatural or the conflict—situates it in a lineage of art cinema that trusts the viewer to hold ambiguity; the editing spaces between the mundane and the uncanny with the precision of a curator arranging a difficult inheritance.
The decision to render the children's transformation through subtle physical gesture and sound design rather than effects spectacle is what makes this work: a single tilted head, a breath that doesn't sync—and suddenly the entire weight of generational trauma lives in gesture alone.