The wellness studio just got a horror satire. Namaslay opens on the yoga aisle.
Junghal Studios’ Namaslay opens Aug. 6 in New York and Los Angeles, then Aug. 13 nationwide, as a masala horror satire aimed at Western yoga’s commercialization and appropriation.
Anika Rao
The polished studio look is not the joke. It is the bait.
Namaslay, the debut feature from Bay Area brothers Rish and Kanish Arhant-Sudhir under their Junghal Studios banner, opens Aug. 6 in New York and Los Angeles theaters, then expands nationwide Aug. 13. Runtime is about 1 hour 52 minutes.
On paper it is masala horror satire. On the beauty and wellness beat, it is a theatrical punch at the industry that turned Yoga into athleisure, retreat packages, and a diversity checkbox on the front desk.
What the studio sells, and what the film scrapes off
Gayatri, played by Kirunthuja Srikanth-Talim (also credited as Kiru Srikanth), arrives in Los Angeles and follows her friend Judy (Angela Sant’Albano) into an upscale yoga studio she has been dying to try. Owner Reyna (Christina Moore) offers her instructor training.
Gayatri looks past the eccentricities, takes the job, and starts reconnecting with the practice her grandmother taught her. The prestigious instructor retreat is where the invitation’s real terms show up. Usha Krishnan plays Paati. Alicia Mitchell-Mangual is also in the core cast.
The brothers have been blunt about the real-world fuel. Their mother practiced and taught Yoga with philosophy and spirit attached, then felt pressure to dilute that for Western rooms. Their father was once turned away from a Bay Area studio for wearing basketball shorts instead of branded athleisure.
Rish later went looking for recovery videos online and found a feed dominated by white instructors packaging the practice as aesthetic spectacle. They call the whole machine the yoga-industrial complex.
Namaslay turns that complex into a blood-soaked reckoning while reclaiming masala cinema’s genre mash for an American theatrical aisle.
Kanish has also flagged tokenization as a thematic hinge: the studio that needs a non-white face for authenticity branding. Gayatri’s first appearance is written as dark-skinned on purpose. Her grandmother calls her mustard seed, kadugu. Specificity is the point, not a soft universal glow-up.
Why it lands on this counter
Goldscene’s beauty lane usually tracks serums, shelf wars, and ambassador math. Wellness is the adjacent aisle that already borrows the same language: ritual, glow, clean, elevated, authentic.
Namaslay is useful here because it treats that language as a power story. Who gets to sell calm. Who gets hired to prove the brand is “rooted.” Who gets asked to leave their grandmother’s Yoga at the door so the retreat can stay Instagram-ready.
Junghal Studios, founded in 2019, is positioning the film as an independent blockbuster without a major-studio permission slip. Venk Potula produces via Khrisp Entertainment alongside the brothers.
Their aunt Swati hand-painted the theatrical poster, and the filmmakers have pushed that art into theater lobbies on a scrappy budget because they want the object to feel like a real movie before the lights go down. International rights chatter is not the headline yet. The Aug. 6 limited open is.
Our take
Treat this as wellness-culture news with fangs, not only as a midnight genre booking.
The Anua shelf fight is about who owns prestige skincare. Namaslay asks who owns the spiritual-adjacent calm those counters increasingly sell.
Our verdict: if you have ever side-eyed a $40 class that mispronounces namaste while scanning for the right Lululemon set, this is the August theatrical appointment that speaks your language. Check Fandango for NYC and LA showtimes first, then watch whether the Aug. 13 expansion keeps the wellness critique loud once the gore jokes travel.
