I happened to come across Lighter, a new fifteen-minute short film by Reel Tribe, and I’m glad I did.
Lighter is about two friends in a hotel room. It is past midnight, and they’ve run out of alcohol. The hotel bar is closed, but they decide to try their luck and see if they can get another drink somehow.
The premise sounds familiar, right? Something some of us might have run into at some point in our lives. But what happens next is something none of us would want to find ourselves in.
The lead characters, played by Jithin Puthanchery and Hrushkeesh Anilkumar, play their parts perfectly as two intoxicated men who irk you enough to make you wish someone would teach them a lesson. When they meet the characters played by Sooraj S Kurup and Gopika Manjusha, you know there’s something amiss about the whole situation. But as the mystery peels its layers one by one, you’re left wondering who you’re really rooting for.
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What makes Lighter stand out is how it uses the constraint of the short film format to its advantage. There are questions this film never answers – about the world outside the hotel room, about the other two characters, about what any of this means. A feature film would feel obligated to explain all of it. Lighter doesn’t. It trusts you to use your imagination, and that restraint is what gives it an unsettling quality that stays with you long after it ends.
The cinematography deserves a special mention too. Malayalam short films have been stepping up in production quality recently, and Lighter is a good example of that shift; it is shot with the kind of care and attention you’d expect from a full-length Mollywood production, not a short. The cinematography and sound design elevate it to something that feels less like a short film and more like a feature.
If you think short films can’t hold their own against features, Lighter might just change your mind. Watch it here:
