We live during something of a horror-film renaissance. In recent years, the genre has supplied not just scares but thoughtful critiques of social ills. Much has been written about masterpieces like “Get Out” (2017) and “Hereditary” (2018). Before either was released, a director named Konkona Sen Sharma made her début with “A Death in the Gunj,” a sharp, lively horror film that doubles as a biting portrait of the patriarchy.

The film, which is now streaming on Amazon, opens with a corpse being placed in the trunk of a baby-blue Ambassador car. A sugary flute track plays during the scene. This is sweet, pastel horror, but it soon becomes something much more terrifying. The setting is McCluskieganj, a town in northeast India, in the nineteen-seventies, and the area is haunted by the spectre of the British colonial empire. Shutu, a troubled college student whose father has just died, is visiting his aunt’s house, where a twisted family dynamic slowly develops around him. Shutu’s cousins and their friends find increasingly cruel ways to torture him; they begin with a prank involving a séance and eventually leave him in a wolf-infested forest. There are other, more familiar tropes—“A Death in the Gunj” wants you to know that it’s a horror movie. We get a summoned spirit, a graveyard tryst, a missing child, a few jump scares, and, yes, a death—the spoiler is right there in the title.

Beneath these genre high jinks is a masterly depiction of how deep-rooted patriarchy can rot a family tree. Shutu is tormented for his crimes against masculinity: he reads and draws, is quiet and emotional, and shows fear instead of anger. “You’re so pretty,” he is told, “you could be a girl.” Sen Sharma isn’t afraid of cliché—we get a well-timed “boys will be boys”—but the film succeeds most when it strays from stale language and points to the specific ills that plague economically privileged, English-speaking Indian families. Though the women drink whiskey, smoke cigarettes, and sing Elvis songs, they are shadowed closely by misogyny, blurred at the edges but still an unshakeable presence. Every remark is double-edged, every interaction stitched with barbed wire. After a slow, simmering buildup, it is almost a relief when the water boils over the lip of the pot. In its gory, heartbreaking final act, “A Death in the Gunj” presents no cathartic subversion of power but turns out, instead, to be a cautionary tale. I found myself glad for the film’s sometimes heavy-handed indictment of violent masculinity—in those final, bloody moments, there was no mistaking who was to blame.