VANANTARA

An eco-vlogger travels into the forests around Bannerghatta, documenting his efforts to remove plastic waste with an automated drone. When he books a cab to return, he meets a fellow vlogger who records his everyday life through a dashboard camera. What begins as an ordinary ride between two strangers gradually becomes an unexpected friendship.

Then a young boy enters their journey carrying what appears to be the head of a goat.

Unaware that they are carrying something far more sinister, the eco-vlogger and cab driver take the boy and his mysterious package deeper into the forest. Their seemingly innocent attempt to help him becomes the beginning of a crime they do not understand.

When the boy disappears, a police officer begins reconstructing the events of the day through the recordings captured by the drone and the cab's dashcam. Ordinary conversations, fragments of journeys and seemingly meaningless images begin to acquire new significance.

The investigation eventually reveals the truth: the boy has killed a woman who had been sexually abusing him. He has cut off her head and used the unsuspecting strangers to transport it into the forest.

Yet the film refuses to turn the revelation into a conventional story of crime and punishment.

The abuse and murder are never graphically shown. From the moment the abuse is revealed, the boy's face is deliberately obscured. What the audience cannot see is instead carried by sound—the boy's escalating cries of pain and the woman's screams, sounds that return at the film's climax.

The police officer ultimately chooses not to arrest the child.

He opens the car door and lets him go.

The boy stands alone beside a highway, his face still blurred, as trucks and other vehicles rush past him. The sound of his trauma returns.

The world keeps moving.

Set against Bannerghatta's landscape of forests, safari and enclosed wild animals, VANANTARA explores the invisible cages created by civilization—law, morality, family and social order—and what happens when those cages fail to protect a child.

The wildness is not always in the forest.

VANANTARA — The Wildness Within.