There is a moment in the most unsettling fables where the punishment outlives the crime. That is where Mohammad Hasani wants to leave you. His new short film, THE POETICS OF STONES, arrives today as a 15-minute descent into a world where devotion curdles into butchery and the earth itself seems to answer back. Clocking in at barely a quarter of an hour, it nonetheless carries the weight of a much longer nightmare - one that begins with a family, a doctrine, and a daughter who dances.
Release Date & Where to Watch
THE POETICS OF STONES releases on October 6, 2026. As a 15-minute independent short in the drama, crime, and horror lanes, it is positioned for the festival and specialty streaming circuit rather than a wide theatrical rollout; check your preferred platform for availability beginning today. Genre purists should note the runtime: this is a film designed to be absorbed in a single sitting, ideally with the lights low and no interruptions. Its brevity is not a limitation but a blade - short enough to wound before you have time to look away.
Cast & Crew
The film is directed by Mohammad Hasani, whose sensibility here leans into the mythic rather than the merely macabre. He is working with a compact ensemble of three: Zahra Raeisolsadat, Roshanak Khosravi, and Mehdi Safarpour. That is a small cast for a story with this much moral architecture, and it suggests a chamber-piece intensity - claustrophobic family dynamics framed against something vast and indifferent. The English-language Hollywood production keeps the dialogue lean and the imagery front-loaded, a choice that suits a narrative where stone does much of the talking.
Currently, THE POETICS OF STONES sits at a 0/10 rating on TMDb - an artifact of having almost no audience data yet, not a verdict. Expect that number to be meaningless within weeks. Early buzz on a short this strange tends to swing wildly once festival programmers and midnight-movie crowds get their hands on it.
Story & What to Expect
The premise is deceptively simple. Under a bleak theocratic regime, parents brutally sacrifice their dancer daughter. The murder is not spontaneous; it is ritual, sanctioned by a system that has taught them to mistake zeal for love. The consequence is immediate and surreal: the parents' heads turn to stone. Meanwhile, the girl is not gone. She is awakened, reborn from the heart of the stones in a mythic second act that trades realism for something closer to folk horror and dream logic.
What should you expect? Do not expect a conventional revenge narrative, and do not expect the film to linger on gore for its own sake. Hasani appears to be after something more unnerving: the idea that violence committed in the name of belief returns as geology. The parents become monuments to their own cruelty - silent, immobile, and impossible to ignore. The daughter's rebirth reframes the story not as tragedy but as transformation, a resurrection that owes more to myth than miracle.
The crime label makes sense in retrospect; there is an act of homicide at the center. The drama lives in the family's twisted logic. The horror is the part you will remember walking home. At 15 minutes, the film has no room for subplots. Every image is load-bearing. Watch for the way stillness functions - statues, stone, silence - as both punishment and portal.
Why It's Worth Watching
Short films rarely get this kind of conceptual ambition. THE POETICS OF STONES is trying to do in fifteen minutes what most features cannot manage in two hours: build a complete cosmology, indict a regime, and leave you with a final image that refuses to dissolve. Hasani is not interested in easy catharsis. The parents' petrification is not justice in any conventional sense; it is a haunting. The daughter's return is not triumph. It is a question.
There is also something timely here. Stories about theocratic cruelty and the sacrifice of children carry an unavoidable charge in 2026, and Hasani wisely keeps the specifics abstract - the regime is never named, the doctrine never spelled out - which lets the parable travel. The three leads, working with minimal dialogue, must carry enormous weight, and the film's success depends on whether their faces can hold a mythology. That is a tall order for any performer, let alone in a quarter-hour.
But the reason to seek this one out is simpler. It is rare to find a genre piece this committed to its own strange poetry. THE POETICS OF STONES does not explain itself, does not apologize, and does not blink. It asks you to sit with stone-headed parents and a dancing girl reborn from rubble, and it trusts you to find the meaning in the silence. For fans of folk horror, religious allegory, and short-form storytelling with teeth, this is required viewing. Fifteen minutes. See what the stones have to say.
