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About This Film
Krisha returns to her family after a long absence determined to prove that she can make Thanksgiving dinner and reenter a life from which addiction and instability have estranged her. Trey Edward Shults turns a familiar holiday premise into subjective psychological cinema. The house is full of relatives, dogs, televisions, cooking, football, overlapping conversations, and old knowledge Krisha cannot control. Camera movement, aspect-ratio shifts, sound, and music increasingly align the audience with her destabilization. Thanksgiving is crucial because it demands the performance of reunion. Krisha wants the meal to become evidence that she has changed, but the family’s caution means every small mistake carries the weight of history. The tragedy lies in how badly she wants one successful ritual to repair damage that cannot be repaired by dinner alone.
Famous Quote
“Keep breathing.”— Krisha (English)
Vibe
Thanksgiving —
Watch For
- Watch the camera’s changing distance from Krisha; formal control tightens and loosens with her emotional state.
- Listen to overlapping family sound and Brian McOmber’s score as ordinary Thanksgiving noise becomes increasingly threatening.
- Notice how cooking functions as Krisha’s chosen proof of competence and belonging.
- Track the family’s guarded reactions—many people know more about Krisha’s history than the film immediately explains.
Production Notes
AFI FEST describes Krisha as Shults’s intensely personal Thanksgiving feature, shot largely in his own family home and performed by multiple members of his real family. The feature expanded an earlier short and won both the Grand Jury and Audience Awards at SXSW. AFI lists an 83-minute runtime, while A24’s current Blu-ray lists 82 minutes—a minor edition discrepancy worth preserving in provenance rather than forcing false precision. Shults edited the film himself, and Drew Daniels photographed it. The use of relatives and a familiar house gives the film a texture difficult to simulate: background behavior feels less arranged because many performers already share real relationships.
Trivia
- Krisha is Trey Edward Shults’s feature directorial debut.
- The story is explicitly set at a family Thanksgiving.
- Shults shot largely in his own home and cast members of his own extended family.
- The feature grew from an earlier short film of the same name.
- Krisha won both the Grand Jury and Audience Awards at SXSW 2015.
Legacy
Krisha established Trey Edward Shults as one of the most formally adventurous American independent filmmakers of the mid-2010s. Its legacy comes from the way technique remains inseparable from family psychology: aspect ratios, long takes, sound distortions, and music are not demonstrations but expressions of a person losing her grip inside a house full of memory. The film also belongs to a strong Thanksgiving tradition in American independent cinema, where a mandated family gathering reveals fault lines rather than healing them. Because Shults used his own relatives and home, Krisha blurs autobiographical texture without presenting itself as documentary. It remains one of the most intense examples of a holiday meal treated as a test that no single person can control.