{Fantastic Fest} Ürei (2026): To Grandmother’s House We Go

Writer-director Yerkezhan Baizhan first told this story two years ago as a short film that premiered at Fantastic Fest, a bite-sized nightmare about a toddler left alone with a frail grandmother. With Ürei’s feature expansion, she’s taken that same haunting kernel of truth and horror and built something considerably richer and more disturbing around it, and the results are genuinely one of the scariest films I have seen yet at Fantastic Fest.

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Its a story all of us can relate to. Fourteen-year-old Kalima (Akerke Kozayyr) is sent to live with her aging grandmother in a desolate Kazakh village. What begins as an ordinary act of discipline by way of familial care slowly curdles into something monstrous. The film opens on a note I suspect plenty of families will recognize instantly, the two parents arguing in the car on the drive out, which is a nice, small reminder that some things really do transcend culture and geography. Our family sits front and center in this movie from minute one, and the sweet, complicated relationship between Kalima and her grandmother is the emotional engine that makes everything that follows land as hard as it does. We feel from the first minute, Grandma is a truthworthy supporter (maybe the only one) of our main character

Every child needs a champion, and so often that champion turns out to be a grandparent rather than a parent. Caring for aging parents is genuinely ripe territory for horror, a tough, thankless stretch of life that doesn’t get nearly enough serious treatment on screen, comedic or otherwise, and Ürei mines that discomfort thoroughly. Kalima sits directly in the middle of her own adolscence and her gradnmothers fading life. The film also taps into something distinctly American even from halfway across the world, that urban rural divide with battle lines drawn as clearly as they are in Kazakhstan. Here in the Midwest, I’ve watched more than a few troubled kids get shipped off to a relative’s farm for a semester or a summer, there’s practically a whole cottage industry built around it (There is indeed a robust Troubled Teen industry in Missouri it sucks), and Ürei understands that impulse to send a struggling kid somewhere quiet and remote to start over.

Baizhan makes excellent use of local lore and the specific dread of nighttime especially an incredible jump scare as it closes out the first act. The film is also smart and careful in how it handles self-flagellation, tying that behavior directly back to self-harm and cutting and it treats how deeply unsettling that connection would be for a child with real weight rather than shock value.

There’s a lovely creative flashback structure running through the cinematography here, and the film’s thematic DNA owes an obvious debt to movies like Relic, which remains one of the genre’s great achievements on this exact subject. Ürei earns that comparison rather than just borrowing from it. There’s also a strong Hereditary influence at work, both in plot mechanics and in how the film distinguishes its night shots from its day shots, and one sequence in particular is essentially the real world version of a room from Hereditary’s dollhouse, one involving the grandmother doing something to Kalima that only a mother who is actively nursing should ever do. It’s genuinely gross, deeply upsetting, and somehow gets worse from there. The banter between the parents while that scene unfolds is pitched perfectly, capturing just how much suspension of disbelief being a parent actually requires day to day, even when something is clearly, deeply wrong under their own roof.

Ürei is the kind of film built for that exact moment you casually learn something absolutely unhinged about your own family that nobody bothered to mention before. You know the type. “You remember Aunt Betty? Yeah, she killed her first husband and did a little time for it.” Excuse me….what”? The second act is edited so tightly it just flies by, and the film never once lets its grip loosen, dead cat included, consider that your warning.

The hair scene in particular is rough, and the young actress at the center of it deserves every bit of praise for committing fully to material that clearly wasn’t easy to shoot. There’s also a thread of gender dysphoria running through the film that caught me off guard, and it left me genuinely curious whether that’s as culturally charged an issue in Kazakhstan as it is here.

The turn at the end of the second act makes the first act’s jump scare look tame by comparison, and that escalation defines the entire back half. Each scene darker and more disturbing than the last. Whoever handled the gore effects deserves serious credit for bringing some of the nastiest imagery I’ve seen this festival to life, dream sequence or not.

The easy reading of Ürei is that the older generation is actively, slowly killing the younger one, and I think that reading holds up as both literally accurate to the plot and uncomfortably true to the moment we’re all living through right now. If audiences in Kazakhstan are wrestling with that same feeling, it says a lot about how widely that particular dread is shared. The final shot felt a bit rushed and I would have liked a bit more resolution to let us sit with what has happened but its still a SHARP feature that folks should check out.

Ürei has its World Premiere at Fantastic Fest, running September 17 through 24 at Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar in Austin. This is exactly the kind of international genre discovery that FF exists to champion, so seek it out. Tickets and the full schedule are at fantasticfest.com/film-guide.

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