Masooda

Sai Kiran's 2022 Telugu film follows a mother and daughter in a modest neighbourhood. The girl begins behaving strangely, and faced with a condition the doctors cannot explain, the mother asks her neighbours for help. The film moves across two time frames. Present events are joined to what happened in the same neighbourhood years earlier; the narrative builds its fear not through effects but through delayed information. It was made on a low budget and the setting is almost entirely one apartment block. The narrative keeps neighbourly relations and religious difference in the background, and the horror works largely through sound and darkness. Who it's for: those who like low-budget Telugu horror. Who it's not for: viewers expecting heavy visual effects; the film keeps its means deliberately limited.