Poniiy Review: Shibesh Motilal's Quiet 2026 Hindi Gem

The premise is deceptively simple. In a small local settlement, a young girl and her family have been looking after a dog named Poniiy. The animal, however, belongs to someone else - a kind-hearted man who has vanished without explanation. The authorities have moved on, the neighbours have moved on, and the world has largely decided that this is one of those sad, ordinary disappearances that simply happens.

The girl refuses to accept that. Convinced that the dog knows something the adults don't, she sets out with Poniiy to find the missing man and bring the two back together. What follows is a journey that is part detective story, part travelogue through rural India, and part meditation on loyalty - the kind that doesn't require language to be understood.

Kunal Singh plays the missing man, seen largely in memory and flashback, and his presence hangs over the film like a half-remembered song. Ananya Raava Basu carries the bulk of the emotional weight as the girl, and she is a revelation - unmannered, watchful, never once playing cute for the camera. The supporting cast, including Raju Kher, Garima Agrawal, Rahul Roy, Rajkumar Kanojia, Mushtaq Khan and Debdut Ghosh, fills out the world with the easy familiarity of character actors who know exactly how much to give.

Motilal's greatest asset here is restraint. He trusts silence. He lets the dog be a dog rather than a trained performer hitting marks, and he lets the girl's determination fray into frustration and fear rather than stay heroically fixed. The camera lingers on dusty roads, on half-empty tea stalls, on the specific texture of small-town apathy toward anyone who goes missing without money or connections behind them. There is a quiet social observation running beneath the sentiment, and the film is better for never shouting it.

Where it wobbles is in the middle hour. The road trip loses urgency, episodic encounters pile up without adding much, and a few subplots - particularly a scrap involving a local strongman - feel like padding. The film also leans on coincidence far too often in its final act, with clues arriving at precisely the moment the screenplay needs them. And while the emotional beats are earned, the runtime stretches them thin; trimming fifteen minutes would sharpen the whole thing considerably.

The technical side is modest but sincere. The score never oversells a moment, and the sound design - Poniiy's breathing, the scrape of paws on stone - does quiet work that dialogue couldn't. This is not a glossy production, and it isn't trying to be. Its ambitions are human-sized.

Pros

• A genuinely moving central performance from Ananya Raava Basu
• Poniiy is filmed with real dignity - no anthropomorphic gimmicks
• Restrained direction that trusts the audience's intelligence
• Grounded, lived-in portrayal of small-town life and its indifference
• Emotional climax that feels earned rather than manufactured

Cons

• Saggy middle act with episodic detours that go nowhere
• Reliance on coincidences to resolve the mystery
• Underused supporting cast, especially Rahul Roy
• Pacing could have been tightened by a good fifteen minutes

Poniiy will not set the box office on fire, and it clearly isn't designed to. This is a film made with modest means and honest intent, and it succeeds at what it sets out to do: make you care about a girl, a dog, and a man none of us have met. The flaws are real - the middle drags, the plotting cheats - but the feeling stays with you longer than the imperfections do. In a year crowded with loud, expensive spectacles, there is something quietly valuable about a film that simply asks you to sit still and feel something. Catch it in a theatre if you can; the silence plays better on a big screen.