Leave Me Alone (2025)
I came to Leave Me Alone partly for its lead. Kiran Sonia Sawar was wonderful in the miniseries Pure, a show I loved, and the chance to watch her carry a horror short was reason enough to say yes when the film-maker Shehroze Khan asked me to take a look. What I found was a thoughtful, ambitious little picture that uses the language of the ghost story to say something much larger than a haunting.
Sawar plays a British-Pakistani woman menaced by an apparition in her own home. On the surface it is a familiar set-up, a woman alone, a presence that will not leave her be, but Khan is reaching for something more pointed. The film reads, to me, as a piece of social commentary on Britain's colonial history in India and Pakistan, the haunting standing in for a past that refuses to stay buried and a debt that has never been settled. It is a smart way in, turning inherited trauma into something you can feel prickling at the back of your neck.
That theme sharpens as the story fills in its history. An older male character emerges as a descendant, the son of a former landowner, and a flashback ties the present-day terror back to that lineage, so the spirit's torment starts to feel less like random malevolence and more like a reckoning. It is an intelligent structure, and it gives the scares a moral weight that a lot of horror never bothers to reach for.
Sawar anchors the whole thing. She grounds the fear in something recognisably human, and her presence carries stretches where the film is still laying its groundwork. That groundwork does take a little while, and for its first half the picture is more interesting than it is frightening, more concerned with mood and meaning than with making you jump.
Then the final two or three minutes arrive, and they are easily the best of it. This is where Khan lets the horror off the leash, and there is some genuinely suspenseful, well-crafted dread on offer, the kind that makes you wish the whole short had operated at that pitch. It is a strong closing hand, and it sends you out unsettled in exactly the way the film has been promising.
Three and a half stars. Leave Me Alone is a good, intelligent short with a real idea at its heart, a terrific lead in Kiran Sonia Sawar, and a finale that genuinely delivers. It takes a moment to find its feet, but it earns its ending, and it marks Shehroze Khan as a film-maker worth keeping an eye on. Well worth seeking out.
Leave Me Alone is a horror short from writer-director Shehroze Khan. Reviewed from a screener provided by the film-maker.
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