Something strange is happening in Mumbai, and for once it has nothing to do with traffic, monsoons, or the machinations of a certain film industry family. It arrives instead in the form of Dreamboat, a twenty-four minute Hindi drama that sounds less like a movie and more like a fever you agree to have on purpose. Aastha Tiku directs, and if the premise is anything to go by, she has no interest in the tidy, the safe, or the easily explained.
Release Date & Where to Watch
Dreamboat lands on October 29, 2026. A short film in every sense that matters - brief in runtime, refusing to be small in ambition - it slots neatly into the growing appetite for Hindi cinema that treats the short form not as a calling card but as a complete statement. Distribution details remain characteristically understated for a project this peculiar, though its festival-adjacent positioning suggests a platform release rather than a multiplex rollout. Keep an eye on streaming announcements as the date closes in; this is the sort of title that tends to appear quietly and then refuse to leave the conversation.
Cast & Crew
Tiku writes and directs, and her cast is a lineup of performers who seem chosen for texture rather than marquee value. Tenzing Dalha, Moses Koul, Supriya Joshi, and Sofia Sharaf lead an ensemble that will carry the film's emotional and psychological weight between them. Joshi, in particular, has built a reputation for finding the absurd lodged inside the sincere - precisely the register this material demands.
Twenty-four minutes is a sprint, not a marathon, and Tiku reportedly shoots it like one, favouring momentum over exposition. The film's Hindi-language, Bollywood-adjacent production places it within an industry increasingly willing to fund the strange, though Dreamboat sounds less like a studio gamble and more like a personal exorcism with a modest budget and excellent instincts.
Story & What to Expect
Here is the plot, and no, it does not get less unusual as it goes. An underground musician is involved in an unconventional romance with her pillow. That romance is violently ended by her mother - a sentence worth reading twice. What follows is a delirious odyssey through Mumbai, with the musician guided by an enigmatic homeless poet while her friendships and her grip on reality fracture around her. Meanwhile, the pillow develops a will of its own.
If that reads like a synopsis assembled during a power cut, consider that Tiku appears to be working in a tradition of magical realism that Hindi literature has always understood better than its cinema. The city becomes a character, the poet becomes a conscience, and the pillow becomes - well, something. A memory that will not stay buried. A grief with a body. A joke that stops being funny somewhere around minute twelve.
Expect a film that is funny in the way that uncomfortable things are funny, and serious in the way that only absurd things can be. The runtime is a mercy, not a limitation. There is no room for subplots, which means every scene has to earn its place, and the fractured-reality structure suggests we will lose our footing alongside the protagonist rather than watch her lose hers from a safe distance.
One caution: TMDb currently lists a rating of 0/10, which reflects zero votes rather than a verdict. Nobody has seen this yet. That is the point.
Why It's Worth Watching
Because Hindi cinema keeps being told what it can and cannot be, and every so often a twenty-four minute film walks in and ignores the memo entirely. Dreamboat is not asking for your patience or your nostalgia. It is asking you to sit with something genuinely odd for less time than it takes to finish a commute - and to accept a Mumbai where the surreal is not a metaphor but plain weather.
Tiku has assembled a cast of actors who can hold a straight face while the world tilts, which is the only way this material works. Sofia Sharaf and Supriya Joshi in particular should have room to do the kind of live-wire work that short films reward and features rarely allow. And Tenzing Dalha and Moses Koul round out a quartet that suggests Tiku cast for chemistry, not categories.
There is also the simpler reason: the premise is unforgettable. You will describe this film to someone at a dinner party and watch their expression change. That is not nothing. In a landscape where so much Hindi content arrives pre-approved, pre-explained, and pre-forgotten, Dreamboat sounds like it was made by people who wanted to make exactly one thing, exactly their way, and then stop.
October 29. Twenty-four minutes. Bring an open mind and possibly a spare pillow.
