Kantara

Kantara (2022) is an Indian folk thriller you can watch online on iFILM. In a coastal village in Karnataka, a man, a forest and an old guardian deity are bound by a vow — and someone has decided to break it for the sake of the land.

Shiva drifts through small jobs and drinking sessions with his friends, keeping his distance from Bhoota Kola, the trance ritual his family has used for generations to speak with the spirit that protects the forest. A childhood scar still haunts him. When forest officer Murali arrives to draw new boundaries and a local landlord quietly tightens his grip on communal ground, the argument over a few acres swells into a clash of law, greed and faith. Rishab Shetty doesn't just play Shiva — he wrote and directed the film too, and its final Bhoota Kola sequence became one of the most talked-about scenes in recent Indian cinema.

Made in Kannada on a modest budget, it turned into a runaway hit across India and crossed over into international release. Reach for it if you want a film where ethnography, action and near-horror mysticism all hold together. Stream Kantara (2022) online on iFILM.