Urei (2026)
Directed & Written by Yerkezhan Baizhan
Starring Akerke Kozaiyr, Tynyshgul Sultanberdieva, Asset Eszhan, Gulbahram Baybosynova, Miyatuly Zangar, & Miras Kayrolla.

Horror

★★★1/2 (out of ★★★★★)

Yerkezhan Baizhan’s Urei is the tragic tale of Kalima (Akerke Kozaiyr), a little girl whose parents take her to rural Kazakhstan where she’ll stay a while with Grandma (Tynyshgul Sultanberdieva). Not a big deal on the surface. But it isn’t long after Kalima arrives that she starts to worry something isn’t quite right with Grandma. First she hears the old woman wailing in the night. Then she sees Grandma doing strange things. As buried trauma continues to unearth itself, Kalima’s time with Grandma becomes perilous.

Urei is equal parts sad and terrifying while Baizhan explores the consequences of unresolved trauma and isolation. Grandma is a woman who’s experienced a couple difficult episodes in her life, yet insists on remaining in the same home where so much of her trauma lives. Urei escalates more with each scene until the audience is propelled to a much different place than the loving, welcoming home Kalima finds at Grandma’s place when she arrived—a place to which neither of them will ever return.

We can read Urei as a Gothic parable about how inter-generational trauma affects an entire family. Grandma’s isolation in rural Kazakhstan is not only geographical, it’s psychological. She chooses her own form of horrible coping rather than seek solace in either her own family or a therapist. She refuses to move out of a home where her worst traumas have occurred. When Kalima is left at the rural home, it triggers Grandma’s worst trauma and all but sends them back in time in the most terrible way imaginable. What haunted Grandma for so long now becomes a physical, corporeal haunting for Kalima. Things progress to horrifying lengths as Grandma’s past buried trauma plays out gruesomely on Kalima’s identity and body.

On top of it all, Kalima’s parents are too busy with their own bad relationship to notice the issues with either Kalima or Grandma. If only the parents paid more attention to both of them, the events of Urei might never have transpired. Urei is a tragic and horrific look at mental illness in steep decline. It’s also a warning about letting loved ones fester in silence and isolation when they’re coping with dark thoughts. Urei is about how real-life tragedy haunts us and, as it illustrates, the ghosts will never go away if they’re ignored, minimised, and locked away deep within.