Pihu

Pihu is a thriller carried entirely by the performance of a toddler, following a young girl left alone at home for a dangerous day amid her parents' domestic strife. Lead actress Myra Vishwakarma was only 29 months old during filming, and the producers marketed her as the youngest performer to carry a film solo. Director Vinod Kapri was able to convince the family to participate because they were already close friends; since a toddler's attention span allowed for only about two hours of shooting a day and scenes couldn't be repeated, three cameras ran simultaneously to capture everything in one take, stretching production to three years. The script was inspired by a real 2014 newspaper story about a four year old left alone in Delhi with her dead mother. Who it's for: anyone interested in thrillers built around genuinely unusual production constraints and grounded in a real incident. Who it's not for: viewers who find scenes of a small child in danger hard to watch, since the film sustains that tension almost the entire runtime.