A Short Review of The Short Film Holy Curse

Snighdha Kapoor’s Holy Curse, a 16-minute English-language short film is already making waves on the festival circuit with a potential spot in the Oscar race after winning top honours at the 19th Tasveer Film Festival—unfolds over a day in the life of Radha, an 11-year-old girl visiting India from America with her parents. What begins as a seemingly ordinary family gathering quickly turns into an unsettling portrait of cultural policing, identity, and the quiet violences that shape girlhood and queerness.

A preteen, Radha, played with remarkable nuance by Mrunal Kashid, becomes the target of her well-meaning yet misguided uncle, on her visit to India with her parents from the United States. The uncle believes she is possessed by an ancestral male spirit that has “taken over her body". Convinced they are breaking a generational curse, he arranges a ritual meant to cleanse her—an act he frames as care, even salvation. Yet through Kapoor’s lens, he becomes the unintentional villain of Radha’s story: a man enforcing norms he believes are protective but ultimately erasing the child in front of him.

The cast including Anup Soni, Adithi Kalkunte, Shardul Bharadwaj, Prayrak Mehta, Suhas Deshpande, and Gayatri Amonkar forms a claustrophobic familial constellation around Radha. Kapoor stages comedic and dramatic beats within tight, suffocating spaces, blending interiors and exteriors in a way that mirrors Radha’s own blurred boundaries: who she is, who she is told to be, and who she might become.

In an interview with The New Yorker, Kapoor explained that in a simpler narrative the uncle would simply be the antagonist. But Holy Curse acknowledges a more complex truth: repressive norms are often upheld by people acting out of love, fear, and cultural conditioning. The character, she revealed, was inspired by her own grandfather. As a child in Ghaziabad in the 1990s, Kapoor “grew up thinking I was a boy.” She played sports with boys, mirrored their mannerisms, and was affectionately called beta—“son”—by her father. When puberty arrived, her grandfather began policing her voice, posture, and self-presentation. “You can’t talk like this,” he would say. “You are a girl.” The warnings, Kapoor notes, were rooted not only in tradition but in fear; in a place where “people were shot in broad daylight,” self-expression was a dangerous thing.

IMDb

That familial tension between care and control, identity and expectation—runs like an electric current through the film however doesn't sit as a heavy weight on the viewers. Kapoor’s fable-like storytelling makes visible a kind of everyday violence that is rarely named yet deeply felt by queer and gender-nonconforming children growing up inside rigid cultural frameworks.

Holy Curse released in 2024 is tender, incisive, and quietly courageous. With its blend of humour, discomfort and emotional clarity, it captures a universal coming-of-age truth.