Poulomi Das

In 2019, Siddharth Anand’s War gave us answers. That, yes, a big, pulpy blockbuster could look slick enough to make your eyes dance. That the camera doesn’t just love Hrithik Roshan — it worships him in salt-and-pepper mode, an object of thirst so undeniable even Tiger Shroff’s stoic glare softens in submission. That Shroff, with his balletic precision and coiled physicality, could turn action into poetry — especially when put chest-to-chest with Roshan, eyes locked, breath mingling. And that somewhere between the beaches, bullets, and blatant homoerotic stares, mainstream Bollywood might have finally figured out how to make spy thrillers pure cinema.

This is how star-crossed romances usually go: boy meets girl, hearts collide, the world relents, and they ride into forever. But not in Dhadak 2, the Hindi remake of Mari Selvaraj’s searing Tamil film Pariyerum Perumal (2018). Here, love doesn’t float above the ground but sinks deep into the soil of caste identity. The film’s lovers, Neelesh (a standout Siddhant Chaturvedi) and Vidisha (Triptii Dimri), are young and idealistic. But society sees their surname before it sees their hearts. He is Neelesh Ahirwar, a first-generation Dalit student who lives in a slum. She is Vidisha Bharadwaj, an upper-caste classmate who falls for him. In debutante director Shazia Iqbal’s hands, Dhadak 2 proves that, in India, love isn’t blind — it sees caste in sharp, unforgiving focus.

Writer-director Karan Kandhari’s mischievous and daring feature debut is a fever dream that veers wildly and often thrillingly between tones: psychological drama, dark domestic comedy, surreal horror fable, and something more inscrutable still. The 119-minute film is anchored by Radhika Apte’s phenomenal turn as an unhappy and restless woman transplanted to the isolating corners of modern-day Mumbai from her rural village only to be caught in circumstances too strange to summarize.

In Gamak Ghar (2020) and Dhuin (2022), Achal Mishra’s previous features, the filmmaker displayed a preoccupation with the many worlds that can be contained within the confines of a house. A similar throughline informs Chaar Phool Hai Aur Duniya Hai, Mishra’s latest outing, which follows renowned Hindi poet and novelist Vinod Kumar Shukla over two afternoons at his home in Raipur. It is a fitting way to render Shukla onscreen, a writer who has spent 50 years of his literary career creating universes out of bare rooms, paying attention to the vivid inner lives of ordinary people who inhabit them. The 54-minute-documentary, now on MUBI, emerged by chance, when Mishra tagged along with actor Manav Kaul and a common friend, the screenwriter Nihal Parashar, to meet the Sahitya Akademi award-winning writer in March 2022. On the initial visit, he focused on shooting conversations between Kaul and the soft-spoken Shukla. Surveying the footage once he returned to Mumbai—then made up of straightforward interviews filmed in unbroken takes—Mishra recognized gaps. “I remember thinking that maybe if I could do one more visit, it would add something more," he says.

In the opening moments of Arati Kadav’s Mrs, you’d be forgiven for mistaking the film as a gentle love story borne out of the great Indian arranged marriage. In Delhi, Richa (a standout Sanya Malhotra), a dancer, meets Diwakar (Nishant Dahiya), an educated gynaecologist and her prospective match for the first time. They exchange glances and share smiles and then end up holding hands on a date at a neighbourhood restaurant. She lets him know that she’s crazy about cassata and he tells her that he’s a fan of “simple, home-cooked food.” Two cuts later, they’re married. It’s as happy as happiness can get.

For a country so invested in rewriting history, it is shocking that there exist so few films and shows that tackle the contours of modern Indian history. Narratives set in pre-Independence India abound in Hindi cinema habituated to churning out period films by the dozen even though filmmakers are rarely burdened by facts or historical accuracy. Oftentimes, the genre, which spans historical biopics and narratives tracking several periods of the country’s freedom movement, becomes a means to an end — a way of reiterating religious extremism of the present rather than investigating the social conscience of a nation.

The story of Mumbai, India’s largest city, is linked inextricably with the story of the Kolis, the lower-caste, Indigenous fisherfolk community whose koliwadas (villages) dot the coastline. Until the 1800s, what we know as Mumbai today used to be an archipelago of seven islands, harmoniously inhabited by Koli communities. These islands turned into a city due to human intervention — a product of several land reclamation projects that also enabled the displacement of Mumbai’s original inhabitants.

If there was an award for turning inventive premises into a drag-fest, I’m certain Indian storytellers would be contending for it. In the last decade of Indian streaming, there has been nothing more frustrating than witnessing filmmakers self-sabotage projects that could have otherwise become definitive storytelling. It’s worse than having to sit through shows that resemble a template and underwhelm in their lack of ambition and finesse. Such shows are easy to churn and easier to forget, their existence devoid of any purpose beyond existing for the sake of populating a catalogue.