A Tale of Sisters, and the Weight of Beauty

MOVIE REVIEW
Skin
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Genre: Psychological Thriller, Short
Year Released: 2025
Runtime: 12 minutes
Director(s): Urvashi Pathania
Writer(s): Urvashi Pathania
Cast: Sureni Weerasekera, Shreya Navile, Srini Kumar, Tina Benko
Where to Watch: shown at the 2025 HollyShorts Film Festival

RAVING REVIEW: Some horror stories rely on monsters, and then there are horror stories that reveal the monsters we’ve been taught to carry within ourselves. SKIN, written and directed by Urvashi Pathania, belongs squarely to the latter category. SKIN makes an immediate impression as a short film that utilizes genre tools to dissect a very real and corrosive issue: colorism and the pressures imposed on women of color to conform to Eurocentric ideals. This is the third indie film I've seen in the last two months that tackles this subject in one way or another, each equally as powerful with its own unique twists.

At its core, SKIN tells the story of Kanika (Sureni Weerasekera), a young Indian-American woman who visits a mysterious skin-lightening clinic. What seems at first like a self-care appointment quickly spirals into a surreal psychological odyssey. The narrative takes on an almost fairy-tale structure, one of seduction and temptation, but the clinic and its processes are deeply sinister. Pathania, drawing from her own experiences with skin bleaching, gives the film a lived-in feel that prevents it from ever slipping into abstraction.

What makes SKIN compelling is its duality — it’s both a deeply personal confession and a sharp cultural critique. Pathania transforms her encounters with beauty standards into an allegory about identity and self-worth. The film literalizes what so many women of color experience privately: the quiet violence of looking in the mirror and feeling “less than.” As the procedure at the clinic grows more surreal, what emerges is not just body horror but an unsettling portrait of internalized shame, generational pain, and the desperate desire to be enough.

The performances are crucial here, and both Weerasekera and Shreya Navile deliver with understated precision. Weerasekera’s Kanika is equal parts vulnerable and restless, embodying the insecurity that drives her into the clinic. Navile, in a parallel role as Kanika’s sister, provides the emotional counterbalance — not just a mirror of shared experience but also a reminder of the family and cultural ties that can either reinforce or resist these pressures. The dynamic between the two is the film’s heartbeat, grounding its more surreal passages in human truth.
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Kathryn Boyd-Batstone’s cinematography shifts between the sterile clinic interiors and intimate close-ups that feel almost suffocating. Reflective surfaces play a constant role, creating a sense that Kanika is both subject and object, always being observed, always being judged. This interplay of framing and reflection underscores the film’s themes — we are what we see, or what we’ve been taught to see, even when it warps us.

Pathania’s choice to keep the runtime tight at 12 minutes is deliberate. SKIN doesn’t overstay its welcome, but in that brief window, it manages to feel expansive, like a nightmare that stretches beyond the screen. The surreal — the clinical procedures, the atmosphere of transformation — bleed into psychological terror. Yet there’s no reliance on cheap jump scares. Instead, Pathania opts for dread and disorientation, capturing the way cultural pressures infiltrate the psyche.

As a short, SKIN also points to a larger possibility. The world Pathania has built, where beauty rituals morph into acts of violence, feels ripe for further exploration. There is so much more behind every glance —a story that could explore the causes and pressures that brought us to this moment. But even as it stands, the short is complete, a microcosm of horror and humanity tightly bound together.

SKIN joins a growing body of work that interrogates identity through the lens of horror. As I mentioned, this is the third film off the top of my head that’s tackled this head-on. This isn’t a generalized allegory — it’s rooted in Pathania’s history, her community, her body. That specificity makes it universal, because the horror of being told you’re not enough resonates far beyond any one culture. Subtlety isn’t the point here, and that’s why it works so well. SKIN is about confronting what society would rather keep hidden, dragging it into the fluorescent light of the clinic and forcing us to stare. It’s confrontational by design, and in its best moments, devastating.

Ultimately, SKIN offers a haunting blend of psychological horror and cultural critique. It’s brief but unforgettable, leaving behind the lingering question: when we change ourselves to be seen, who are we becoming? For a 12-minute short, it's a wound that cuts deep.

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[photo courtesy of TAKE IT EASY PRODUCTIONS]

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