Lie Detector (Short) 2026 Review - Antony’s Dark AI

Shaan’s affliction is both a curse and a crude lie detector. He can no longer attend family gatherings, conduct business, or even watch the news without his palm itching for contact. Enter Dr. Kora Mathew, a man whose entire practice is built on validating his patients’ delusions while billing their insurance. Kora dismisses Shaan’s condition as psychosomatic, but he makes the fatal mistake of claiming he can “cure the uncontrollable impulse” within a week. When Shaan asks, “Will this genuinely work?” - slap. Kora’s office becomes a boxing ring, and the doctor realizes he has a problem: his new patient is a human polygraph, and Kora is a pathological liar.

Desperate to neutralize the threat, Kora invites Shaan to a late-night “therapy session” at his clinic, a trap designed to discredit the condition. But the night spirals when Kora’s assistant Soosi (Shalini Pai) and a cast of shady characters - a car owner (Sidharth Radha Krishna), a suspicious wife (Hasli Amaan), and a jittery friend (Nived Girish) - keep wandering in, each one dripping with more falsehoods. Every handshake, every casual compliment, every “I’m fine” becomes a percussive symphony of correction. The session devolves into a survival game where Kora must navigate a minefield of his own fabrications, all while Shaan’s hand grows more trigger-happy.

The film’s greatest strength is its economy. At 17 minutes, Antony doesn’t waste a single frame on exposition. We learn everything about Shaan’s despair through a montage of slaps - at a wedding toast, a traffic stop, a job interview - each one landing with a satisfyingly wet thwack. The sound design is impeccable; the slap is rendered as a comedic cymbal crash, never a painful crack. This keeps the violence cartoonish, not mean.

Jeo Baby steals the show as Dr. Kora. He plays the psychiatrist as a smarmy con artist whose lies have calcified into a personality. Baby delivers his lines with a theatrical lisp, as if he’s tasting each falsehood before spitting it out. His nervous breakdown is a gradual, hilarious undressing: first, the tie loosens; then, the hair falls into his eyes; finally, he’s sweating through his shirt while promising Shaan a full refund. The chemistry between Baby and Antony (the actor) is a classic straight-man/funny-man dynamic - Shaan is mortified by his own hand, while Kora is horrified by his own mouth. Their back-and-forth over a single chair (“Please sit.” “Liar.” “Okay, stand.”) is the film’s sharpest exchange.

Director Antony also has a solid visual sense for a debut short. He shoots the clinic in sterile whites and teal shadows, making the room feel like an antiseptic purgatory. One sequence, where Kora tries to sneak a syringe into Shaan’s drink, is framed in a single unbroken take, the camera tracking Shaan’s hand as it hovers over the glass, ready to strike. It’s tense, silly, and visually clever. The supporting cast - particularly Shalini Pai as the receptionist who lies about everything from her age to her lunch order - understands the assignment: keep it broad, keep it fast.

However, the film’s logic is, naturally, wobbly. Why doesn’t Shaan just wear mittens? Why does Kora not simply ban all dialogue? The movie anticipates these questions and answers them with a shrug and another slap. The comedy lies in the inevitability, not the cleverness of the escape. There’s also a subplot involving a stolen car and a jealous best friend that feels grafted on - it adds runtime but dilutes the core tension. The final beat, a cheeky freeze-frame that implies the curse is now pandemic, is a little too cute for its own good.

Pros

• Jeo Baby’s unhinged, theatrical performance is a masterclass in comedic arrogance.
• Crisp, percussive sound design makes every slap feel like a punchline.
• A tight, escalating script that respects the audience’s attention span.
• Efficient visual storytelling; the opening montage does more in two minutes than most features do in twenty.

Cons

• The middle section drags slightly with the car-theft side plot that goes nowhere.
• The premise’s rules are arbitrary; sometimes the hand slaps lies, sometimes it slaps barely-veiled truths, which feels inconsistent.
• The supporting characters are cardboard cutouts, existing only to be slapped.

“Lie Detector (Short)” is a delightful fever dream that knows its limits. It’s a one-trick pony, but the trick is performed with such infectious glee that you’ll forgive the thin narrative. For a 17-minute runtime, it packs more genuine laughs than most 130-minute comedies released in Malayalam this year. It’s not profound, and it’s not trying to be. It’s just a well-tuned engine of embarrassment and justice, revved up and released into the wild. If this is a preview of what Antony can do with a longer leash and a bigger budget, we should be very scared - and very entertained. Worth a watch, especially if you’ve ever wanted to slap a liar without consequences. Three out of five slaps, confidently delivered.