Pinch Review: Sharp Humor Meets Social Reckoning

Uttera Singh’s Pinch (2025) arrives as a confident first feature from a multi-hatted creator who writes, directs and plays Maitri, a young travel-vlogger grappling with an assault by her own landlord. Set in a dusty western Indian town, the film unfolds within a cramped apartment complex and spills into a vibrant Hindu festival sequence.

Singh opens with a startling public attack—an unsuspecting guest accused by Maitri of violating her—and then rewinds twenty-four hours, tracking how everyday interactions among neighbors, relatives and festival pilgrims build toward riotous retaliation.

This social dramedy balances wry humor with mounting tension as Maitri navigates patriarchal strictures and her own thirst for justice. Singh’s tight script clocks in at just 83 minutes, moving briskly from hallway confrontations to ritual processions with minimal detours.

The result is an invitation to global audiences to observe small-town India through a lens that alternates between wry observation and emotional intensity, all carried by Singh’s assured performance and clear narrative thrust.

Plot Mechanics: From Flashback Tricks to Festival Fury

Pinch launches with a startling prologue: Maitri’s neighbor, Rajesh, lies battered at a festival ground as onlookers gleefully pummel him. That opening moment, shot in tight handheld bursts, primes viewers for a non-linear structure. Singh immediately jumps back to the previous day, introducing Maitri in her cluttered home, quarreling with her vlogger friend Samir and fielding her mother Shobha’s disapproval.

The inciting incident erupts on an overnight bus packed with pilgrims en route to a Navratri celebration. Sleepy and trusting, Maitri awakens to find Rajesh’s hand tracing her torso. Her stunned reaction is captured by sudden close-ups and a muted score, signaling betrayal. As the group reaches the festival, Maitri seizes her moment: she redirects the crowd’s wrath toward Rajesh’s wife, sparking the chaos glimpsed in the cold open.

Back in the apartment, whispers swirl—neighbors accuse Maitri of manipulation, Shobha vacillates between shame and solidarity, and gossiping aunties fan the flames of scandal. Subplots weave through Maitri’s online ambitions and her mother’s traditional expectations. Ultimately, Maitri must face the fallout: hospital bills arrive, Rajesh demands apology, and Shobha steps up to challenge community hypocrisy in a confrontation that tests both women’s resolve.

Voices and Conflicts: Patriarchy, Retribution, Family Ties

Singh presses at the fault lines of gender and power. On one side, patriarchal norms condone Rajesh’s assault as minor or routine; on the other, silence becomes complicity. Maitri’s hesitation to speak up echoes a generation taught to tolerate violation, while Shobha’s early reaction—that such harms “just happen”—reflects a lived history of muted resistance.

Justice in Pinch springs from spontaneous mob action, yet Maitri wrestles with the ethics of her crowd-sourced vengeance. She exposed Rajesh, but at the cost of implicating an innocent woman. That moral knot raises questions about culpability and collateral damage, inviting viewers to consider how rights-based claims intersect with unpredictable human behavior.

Within this tension, the mother–daughter bond deepens. Shobha shifts from urging concealment to defending her child, her counsel shaped by protective instincts and communal pressures. Singh contrasts Shobha’s pragmatic caution with Maitri’s American-influenced belief in individual agency, crafting each woman as an emblem of generational shifts in self-assertion.

Community hypocrisy emerges through neighbors like Heena and Rani, whose gossip channels “what will people say?” anxieties. Samir’s success as a male vlogger underscores gendered double standards: his content is praised, hers dismissed. Through Maitri’s camera, Singh comments on self-representation—an act of reclaiming narrative authority even as her protagonist struggles to control the forces around her.

Craft and Performance: Camera, Sound, and Ensemble Strength

Singh’s debut radiates confidence in rhythm and tone control. She balances quips with pulses of dread, guiding viewers from playful banter in crowded corridors to sudden bursts of violence. Her Snorricam sequences keep the camera locked on Maitri’s reactions, amplifying every quiver of discomfort during assault and its aftermath.

Visually, tight tracking shots follow Maitri through narrow hallways and onto festival grounds, creating an immersive spatial tension. Color shifts—naturalistic hues for daily life, cooler or shadowed palettes for intrusive nightmares—signal shifts in her mental state. The brisk editing stitches flashbacks, festival chaos and domestic disputes into a taut narrative that never lingers on extraneous detail.

Raashi Kulkarni’s score weaves Indian classical percussion and vocal syllables into key moments, sometimes bleeding diegetically into party scenes or private nightmares. That interplay of sound and image heightens emotional beats, whether a whispered confession or a mounting riot.

Singh anchors the film with a layered turn as Maitri, portraying both vulnerability and fierce determination. Geeta Agrawal grounds the family angle as Shobha, her facial expressions charting fear, frustration and fierce protection. In supporting roles, Nitesh Pandey instills Rajesh with unsettling normalcy, Badri Chavan offers light relief as Samir, Sunita Rajwar embodies social policing in Heena’s gossipy zeal, and Sapna Sand adds tension as the attacker’s wife.

Comic asides—bathroom banter among aunties, vlogger slogans—soften grim moments yet never detract from stakes. This interplay keeps viewers engaged, continuously negotiating between laughter and shock as Pinch probes power, voice and collective action in a community under scrutiny.

“Pinch” is an 83-minute Hindi-language comedy-drama that had its world premiere in the International Narrative Competition at the Tribeca Festival on June 6 2025, with additional public screenings through the festival’s close on June 15 in New York City.

Full Credits

Director: Uttera Singh

Writers: Uttera Singh, Adam Linzey

Producers and Executive Producers: Suneeta Singh, Muktesh Singh, Uttera Singh, Faissal Sam Shaib, Anirudh Singh, Akanksha Jain, Jenna Cavelle, Jan Bezouska, Pranav Soni, Siddharth Singh, Harshita Singh

Cast: Uttera Singh, Geeta Agrawal, Sunita Rajwar, Sapna Sand, Badri Chavan, Nitish Panday

Director of Photography (Cinematographer): Adam Linzey

Editors: Faroukh Virani, Louise Innes, Vanessa Ruane

Composer: Raashi Kulkarni