The sight of a giant paper mache head will now have you running to lock your doors after watching Neal Suresh Mulani’s entertaining Rat! A great look at the role social media has on our society today.
When music journalist Navin (Neal Suresh Mulani), disgruntled with the lack of engagement he gets on social media, turns his ire on a global pop star for their supposed queerbaiting, the singer’s devoted fans descend on his remote cabin to wreak havoc and seek retribution.
When people write a post on social media with venom or hate directed towards another person, the worst reaction you imagine they will get is some people disliking it, slight lambasting, etc. At most, a few online disagreements eventually taper out with a mute block. You never expect that when you or someone else goes off about someone online, the repercussions will result in a stranger coming and knocking on your front door.
It’s a great premise that is nailed here in Neal Suresh Mulani’s horror comedy Rat! Yet, it doesn’t rest on its laurels as a one-note film. We see the strain that not having engagement as a writer has on Navin; he is a frustrated person who wants to find success in this field, yet for his life, he can’t. So, when he sees someone popular talk in such a demeaning way about someone and get engagement thrown at them, he foolishly and desperately jumps onto the bandwagon.
When he starts to feel the wrath of the backlash for what he has said, even from the person who started him off on his multiple tangents, you can’t help but feel for him. He is trying to get himself out there, and as we find out in those 17 minutes, it is something that seriously backfires on him. The person who started it all says, “You know what it never was? That serious”, and because Navin has gone that far down the rabbit hole of desperate anxiety, he lashes out at that person, too.
He also makes the rookie error: if you are going to say something about someone popular online that is negative, you best bloody hope that you have your online house in order, and he most certainly didn’t. In fact, that is part of the horror in Rat!. Knowing how people can grab everything about your online life out in minutes if they are so pleased is horrifically terrifying.
Once the Strangers-esque torment begins for poor Navin, Rat! Transforms into a captivating horror-filled treat for the audience. The fact that we are presented with a character that we are not automatically supposed to love, yet we find ourselves rooting for him to escape the situation he has placed himself in, is a testament to the compelling storytelling. The unexpected turn of events, particularly the revenge of the pop star stans on Navin, keeps the audience on the edge of their seats, surprising them with a resolution that is better than what they might have anticipated for someone who posts the kind of things he posts.
Mulani’s film is all about insecurity, from Navin being insecure that his talents are not coming across online and so in a world where he wants to be someone, he is at that time a mere footnote, which isn’t enough. With those “stans” of our popstar, they are insecure about the idea of seeing the person they have hitched their horse to being undermined and ridiculed as that means they are also being ridiculed and that just will not do. It’s fantastic that Mulani could feed this into his short film, as it allows for such a strong foundation for the film to bounce that premise off for the remainder of the film.
There is so much discussion about how we act online in Rat! that for awhile you forget you are watch what is meant to be a horror. Which makes those scenes that are full of tension and worry for Navin all the better. You like, Navin, never expect one post to go that far and while the film doesn’t take the expectedly gruesome direction, what it does is leave you with a lot to think about. So, what is the lesson that you take away from Rat!? Be careful who you post disparaging things to online, especially celebrities; you never quite know what will happen.
★★★ 3/4
For more of our coverage of the HollyShorts Film Festival, please check out our reviews below.
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