ÜREI

When an elderly grandmother is left alone with her young granddaughter, a routine visit gradually gives way to an experience where vulnerability, memory, imagination, and reality begin to blur. Yerkezhan Baizhan, returning with a feature length version of the short that world premiered at FF in 2024, crafts a compact work of horror that is as emotionally resonant as it is unnerving. Avoiding conventional shocks in favor of mounting psychological tension, ÜREI builds its atmosphere through sound and the fragile rhythms of domestic life. The familiar interior of a rural Kazakh home becomes a space where generational bonds coexist with ancient fears, transforming an ordinary act of familial care into an unsettling descent into the unknown.

Blurring the boundaries between psychological distress and folklore, Baizhan uses the language of supernatural horror to evoke the emotional realities of grief, loneliness, and the quiet terror of growing old. Through haunting, dark fairy-tale imagery, the film explores the grandmother's increasing isolation and voicelessness alongside the granddaughter's struggle to navigate a world that has suddenly become unfamiliar and threatening. As inherited fears pass between generations, the child is forced to confront mysteries she cannot yet understand, and learn that loss can take monstrous forms.

Rooted in the textures of rural Kazakh life yet strikingly universal in its exploration of childhood fear, aging, and mortality, ÜREI suggests that the most terrifying stories are those whispered within families and carried across generations. With remarkable confidence and restraint, Baizhan emerges as a distinctive new voice in contemporary genre cinema, finding profound emotional weight and unexpected tenderness within terror and unease. (SARA LOPO)

*Paired with the short THE SUN WON'T SHINE dir. Adham Khaled

Siblings fend for themselves in a harsh landscape, fraught with dangers. A discovery disrupts their solitude.