Greater Kalesh review: A Diwali film that brings messy reality to the romance of the festival!

In Greater Kalesh, TTT’s collaboration with Netflix feels like a small but thoughtful gift, one that captures Diwali in all its poetry and everyday realism.

Recently, while writing about how the American animated film Encantoreminded me of Diwali, that warm, golden time of homecomings and fairy lights, my actual Diwali looked a little different. My mother was shouting instructions from one corner of the house to another, the dusting clothes were out, and every surface was in the process of being a shining moment of themselves. Somewhere between the cleaning and scoldings, I realised the irony of this festival that while I was busy romanticising the festival of togetherness, real Diwali was embbeded in chaos. The kalesh before the calm and that’s what Netflix’s short film Greater Kalesh is also about! 

Made in collaboration with Terribly Tiny Talkies, the one-hour film doesn’t idealise the festival, it humanises it. It begins with Twinkle, or Tinku (Ahsaas Channa), who returns from Bangalore to her Delhi home in Greater Kailash to surprise her Handa family for Diwali. In her head, it’s a dream-like homecoming with fairy lights, laughter, maybe a few nostalgic hugs. But the moment she arrives, reality greets her at the door with raised voices and old resentments. Her family is in the middle of a fight over a long-buried secret her father has kept from everyone. As she tries to uncover what’s being hidden, other truths tumble out too. From her brother’s real love interest to the reason this could be their last Diwali together in the home they’ve always known.

Also Read: #BingeRecommends: Finding Diwali in Disney’s Encanto, where the magic candle burns much like a diya!

It’s a tender small story full of the kind of domestic messiness that makes Indian families both maddening and magnetic, especially during the time of Diwali. The Delhi winter, the accent, the food, the warmth everything felt familiar. As Tinku moved through her childhood home, trying to reconnect with friends, eat her mother’s cooking, and hold her family together, I found myself thinking of my own trips back to Chandigarh from Delhi during Diwali breaks. The same house that once felt like mine suddenly looked different, a little foreign. And this strange feeling of belonging and displacement took over all at once, when the house you grew up in starts to feel like a memory you’re visiting. Something that was happening to Tinku as well as she felt like a guest in her own home!

She deals with the weight of returning home as an adult when the cracks in the walls and relationships suddenly come into clearer focus. The family’s financial troubles, the quiet exhaustion in the parents’ marriage, the burden of pretending everything’s fine - all things you start noticing when you’re old enough to help but young enough to still feel helpless. Greater Kalesh captures that perfect desire to fix everything, to hold the family together for just one more Diwali, even when you know some things can’t be fixed.

By the end, the film turns the festival into a metaphor, not just for light, but for clarity. Diwali, after all, is about cleaning enough to make room for new beginnings. For Tinku and everyone, it becomes the moment when illusions burn away and uncomfortable truths come to surface. What begins as a celebration becomes a reckoning and yet, somehow, a renewal too. The charm of Greater Kalesh lies in how it embraces the contradictions of Indian family life where the noise, the secrets, the laughter somehow survives every argument. It’s a film about love, but not the kind wrapped in shiny paper but the kind that exists in the middle of a mess. The kind that feels, oddly enough, like Diwali itself.

Greater Kalesh is streaming on Netflix!

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