Film

Krisha

Name: Krisha
Genre: Drama, Thriller
Released: 2016
Cast: Krisha Fairchild, Alex Dobrenko, Robyn Fairchild, Chris Doubek, Victoria Fairchild

Family drama
Very dark

Krisha is a queasy, handheld portrait of a family reunion gone wrong, shot in writer-director Trey Edward Shults's own childhood home with his real relatives, including his aunt in the title role. It plays less like a drama than a slow-building panic attack — discordant score, wandering camera, a woman fraying in real time at the Thanksgiving table. Intense and claustrophobic, not a cosy holiday film.

TMDb rating

3.4

Should you watch it?

Watch it if you like family drama that feels uncomfortably real, where tension builds through small talk, overlapping voices and a camera that stays close to a woman coming apart in plain sight.

Skip it if you want a clear plot, a steady rhythm or any relief from awkwardness, since much of it is tense, cramped and deliberately hard to sit through.

What it asks of you: At 82 minutes it is short but intense, mostly confined to one house and one long afternoon, and it demands sustained attention to faces and unspoken friction rather than events.

Not sure? Find tonight's pick in a minute.

If you liked this

Rachel Getting Married2008

Anne Hathaway plays an addict returning to her sister's wedding, and the handheld camera never lets you settle, catching every flinch and old wound the family would rather ignore.

But It's long, sprawling, and deliberately chaotic — some viewers find the constant camera swirl exhausting rather than immersive.

Uncut Gems2019

Same stomach-dropping dread, different scale — Sandler's Howard ricochets through one catastrophic day with a score that never stops pressing on your chest, exactly like Krisha's clarinet drone.

But It's louder, faster, and more plot-driven than Krisha — less a character study, more a panic attack with a jewel heist attached.

Hereditary2018

Toni Collette's unraveling matriarch and a family dinner that curdles into something monstrous — Ari Aster shares Shults's interest in grief metastasizing into full collapse.

But It tips fully into horror by the end, adding supernatural elements that Krisha, grounded entirely in one flawed woman, never needed.

Not sure tonight? Get a pick in a minute, starting from Krisha

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

A Woman Under the Influence1974

Cassavetes shot his own family and friends in his own house, using handheld intimacy to follow a woman's breakdown in real time — literally the blueprint Shults was working from decades later, right down to casting relatives.

Gena Rowlands gives one of cinema's great unraveling performances, and the camera stays so close you feel implicated rather than just watching — the original template for the kind of collapse Krisha stages at a dinner table.

But It's nearly two and a half hours of sustained discomfort, shot in grainy 1970s film stock that some find punishingly slow.

The Savages2007

Laura Linney and Philip Seymour Hoffman play estranged siblings forced back together by a parent's decline — quieter than Krisha, but just as honest about resentment disguised as duty.

But It's gentler and more comic in tone, without Krisha's sense that everything might explode any second.

Margot at the Wedding2007

Noah Baumbach's most acidic film — Nicole Kidman's Margot arrives for her sister's wedding and slowly poisons the well, sibling wounds reopening in real time.

But Almost everyone in it is unlikeable by design, which some viewers find bracing and others simply find unpleasant.

Beautiful Boy2018

Steve Carell and Timothée Chalamet trace addiction's toll on a family from the outside in — less experimental than Krisha, but sharing her interest in relapse as slow-motion betrayal.

But It's more conventional and tear-jerking, trading Krisha's formal unease and dread for straightforward, well-lit melodrama.

August: Osage County2013

A pill-popping matriarch, a house full of grudges, and a dinner table that turns into a battlefield — broader and starrier than Krisha, but the same recipe for disaster.

But It's stagey and shouty, adapted from a play, where Krisha whispers and August: Osage County screams.

Manchester by the Sea2016

Casey Affleck's grief-frozen return home shares Krisha's sense of a family circling a wound nobody will name, though this one moves at a much slower, sadder pace.

But It's mournful rather than tense — patient grief, not the ticking-clock dread that drives Krisha.

The Wrestler2008

Mickey Rourke's washed-up wrestler tries to reconnect with an estranged daughter, and the film shares Krisha's queasy sense that redemption might already be too late for its wounded lead.

But It's set in a completely different world of wrestling rings and strip clubs, further from Krisha's suburban dining room than it sounds.

Capturing the Friedmans2003

Where Krisha fictionalises one family's unraveling using real relatives playing versions of themselves, this documentary does the reverse — real home-video footage of an actual family disintegrating, blurring the same line between performance and confession that Shults exploits.

A real family's home movies become the raw material for a documentary about accusation, denial, and a household coming apart — the uncomfortable authenticity Krisha fakes so well, this one didn't have to fake at all.

But The subject matter — accusations of abuse within the family — is much darker and more disturbing than anything in Krisha.

Arrested Development2003

Same ingredients as Krisha — a black-sheep relative returning, old resentments, a family that can't stop hurting each other — rewired entirely for comedy, proof the dysfunctional-family-reunion engine runs just as well in a sitcom as a thriller.

Every toxic dynamic Krisha plays for dread — the enabling, the scapegoating, the relative nobody wants at the table — shows up here too, just turned inside out into some of the sharpest sitcom writing ever made.

But It's a broad, joke-a-minute network comedy with zero interest in the tension and doom Krisha builds so carefully.