Anya’s Tutorial Series Review: A nerve-racking horror tale that demanded a better closure 

Creating and sustaining tension is sacrosanct in horror; it is a deal-breaker. Tension separates good horror from bad horror. Acts like a person walking down a spooky hallway with flickering lights or venturing into the woods alone at the midnight are to the horror genre what hand-to-hand combats and gun fights are to action. Constricted spaces, dim lighting, and corners from where anything can jump at you are elements the genre thrives in. Silence pronounces eeriness; stillness foreshadows shock; emptiness carries creepiness. While watching horror, our mind is driven by fear of something terrible happening in the blink of an eye. It’s a genre that has tension innately engraved in it. This is why Anya’s Tutorial by Pallavi Gangireddy is a compelling watch for the most part. It keeps us on edge, always on the lookout for the sight of a ghost in every corner of the screen. When it finally drops the scare, whether it rattles you or not is a subjective reflex, but the objective of the filmmaking here is to make us experience the stress. And it bloody well does that. 

For the most part of Anya’s Tutorial, nothing really happens. And it is most effective during this part. The narrative spends a substantial chunk of runtime following the titular character (a confident Nivedita Sathish) and numerous other characters who just sit in front of the webcam in a creepy house as we await the ghost to jump at us. Surprisingly, the series never aims for low-hanging fruits—although there are a couple of jump scares. The emphasis is more on the mysterious atmosphere and less on the frights. 

Cinematographer Vijay K Chakravarthy and art directors Abhishek Raghav, Thirumala and Nagendra capture the spookiness of the haunted house brilliantly. The light and shadow play is spot on, always piquing you to closely observe every nook and corner, just to be sure there is nobody hiding in the background and that really is the show’s biggest strength; it creates an environment where the possibility of creating a scare is omnipresent. 

You even wonder if Sun exists in the world of Anya's Tutorial. Every scene is punctuated by dark spaces, making it a playground for a horror filmmaker. The setting might not look real but it is chilling and that gets the job done here.

Instagram lives serve as the core plot point—when the ghost in Anya’s house makes an appearance behind her during a live streaming session, it sparks a debate about the genuineness of the paranormal sighting and also catalyses the online following. Although the series doesn’t comment much on the influencer culture, it puts this live feature to a terrific usage visually. The vertical image ratio lends a claustrophobic look to the show and helps enhance the fear.

After four episodes that set up the main character and hint at the backstory—a traumatic childhood involving another haunted house and Anya's troubling relationship with her sister Madhu (Regina Cassandra, acing a grey role like always, even though the character is not fully etched out), the problems begin to emerge when the narrative refuses to go a notch higher. By then, we are aware of the ghost in Anya’s new house and the actual ghosts of her past, but the focus remains on creating more threads instead of exploring any one of them with the depth they deserve. The writing plants more questions than it can answer, culminating in an ending that’s infuriating for all the wrong reasons. A child abuse angle is introduced; while it is revealed to us that Anya suffered abuse as a child early on in the show, the writing still makes it a point to build its flashback sequences towards this incident, which adds no value when it drops finally. There is an angle involving a teenager who starts feeling a supernatural presence after watching Anya’s live streams; a news report says that kids who are watching Anya’s live streams are missing; and there’s a paranormal expert who is affected… you see, not one of these facets is explored. After a point, I wondered what the main conflict was. Even the tension relents towards the end, ascribed to overkill. 

Why add layers of mystery when there is no intent to solve, or at least, address it? The ending is decidedly left cold, just like the body of the ghost Anya sees as a child, whose purpose we never learn about, because the show doesn’t really care in offering a conclusion. Cold endings and cliffhangers are great, incomplete and half-baked endings are not; Anya’s Tutorial mistakes the latter for the former.

Barring its ending, Anya’s Tutorial, as a horror show, posits some interesting ideas on the table and comes close to realising some of them. A tense atmosphere from start to finish, however, ensures that it holds our attention as the horror unravels before fizzling out towards the end.