Bandar Movie Review from TIFF 2025 — Anurag Kashyap

An Anurag Kashyap film, at an international film festival, was a prospect I was excited about 2 years ago as well, May 2023 to be precise.

Let’s hope Bandar has a better fate than Kennedy!

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Written by Sudip Sharma and Abhishek Banerjee, Bandar ko Anurag co-direct karte hain Sakshi Mehta Lau ke saath. At the centre is Samar, a has-been pop-star who clings to the last shreds of relevance, longs for attention, and slowly learns to see his own complicity in the expectations of the performance of masculinity. His life changes when a woman with whom he had a one-night stand, returns to exert space. A sexual molestation case is filed, Samar is imprisoned, and every reality, every truth about humanity he has known thus far, comes into question.

Like that vast cast and crew, some of whom I spoke with at TIFF, Bandar is a whole lot of things fighting each other to come to the fore. It’s a prison procedural while giving commentary on the desperation of celebrity culture. Ofcourse police brutality and corruption is a central theme while also exploring the power social media holds over popular narrative and justice. Are all women innocent is a central question, along with making a case for more women in professional fields. The point is, Bandar is unapologetically divisive, brutish in its demand for confrontation.

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Bobby Deol as Samar is a pitiful character. Everything from his entry shot, to the very last scene is designed to impress upon the viewer the duality of his existence — the loser hidden beneath the façade of a shiny big man, he literally wears a back brace kyunki metaphorically reedh ki haddi shayad nahi hai. Masculinity to Anurag Kashyap is an inflated spectacle. Men who think of themselves as bigger and more important than the rules of the world, those men who punch down, those who assume the world will just simply bend to their will, are men who are destined to tumble, fall and fail. Bobby Deol wonderfully goes along with his vision of creating a man-child- he wears Superman boxers, he has house help who calls him baba, his biggest hit has outdated lyrics “Come on baby dil kisko degi,” on his nightstand, you can see a photo of him which was probably a publicity shot from Barsaat irl. Samar is in arrested development. Nostalgia nahi, his attempt to hold on to past glory, smells of stagnation.

Right as youre on your tsk tsk looking at this man, he is accused of a crime he may or may not have committed and the film’s first flip-flop appears — are the male writers and male director attempting to sanitise this pathetic man by saying look already things are not good for this person, do you really think he deserves to go through more trials? In Indian under-trial prisons, where the process is the punishment, Samar’s world turns irrevocably bleak; the gaze now shifts to a larger evil, bigger than male entitlement, the cruelty of law enforcement. The story slowly begins to mirror the real-world, edging closer to a place where it can appeal to the viewer’s humanity- a cop takes a selfie with Samar, another repeats Amitabh Bachchan’s Pink “no means no” dialogue, and youre taken inside the grotesque living conditions of Indian prisons, many shots of faeces included. By minimising this man’s alleged crime, the film almost seems to be saying, “so what, there are larger things we must discuss here! Men too are victims of the same system!”

And then almost immediately, the story’s women come forth as carefully drawn foils. An incredible Sanya Malhotra plays Samar’s sister Suhani, burdened with the task of being related to a man she knows is capable of severe harm, if not straight-up crime. She calls him an idiot when talking to their lawyer, and even when he’s in prison rebukes him for using crude language about his ex. The other moral compass is the current girlfriend Khushi played by Saba Azad, who upon realising the truth might actually be murky, refuses to stand by and waste her time. Both these women go from furious to afraid to exhausted by the system. That these women are the “sorted” ones here while the men flounder in self-importance and violence is not incidental, this is by design. Even the ex girlfriend, Gayatri played by a gorgeous Sapna Pabbi may or not feel remorse. Film yeh inflame bhi karti hain, par fatafat retract bhi. In another scene while the cops almost take pleasure in reading reports of sexual assault, a lady constable winces uncomfortably sitting in the same room, translating for them.

But through it all, the film refuses to let Samar off the hook. As he suffocates inside a black mask put on his head in front of the media, he thinks of the time when wanted to choke Gayatri during sex. Is he repenting? Do we sense guilt? Is he at fault?

Inside prison, Kashyap stages a rapid descent into animality. Jail ki subah subah waali devotional morning chants are almost mickngly hopeful considering the barbaric conditions. The man is finally in a world where this “problem”, women, simply don’t exist, and what a wretched world it is. But here too, there are two parallel notes — we are supposed to feel bad for these under-trials and the dismal conditions they live in, but also despise them for the views they hold on women, insisting all rape charges are either false or unjustified or the victim was “asking for it.” Yahaan violence bhi hai par empathy bhi. Joh log auraton ki body police karne lagey they, unki khud ki bodily autonomy chhin gayi toh bhar bhar ke irony bhi.

Bandar remains watchable because it refuses to bend to moral binaries, which is a risqué swing. You aren’t presented with an innocent martyr nor do you see a frothing predatory monster. However, the film fumbles entirely when a final text slate hits you over the head with the film’s thesis- onscreen statistics talking about false rape cases filed in India. Now, whether this is intended to highlight the inefficiency of the system or not, ending the film on this note establishes resolutely where it expects our sympathy to lie. A statistic about how many SA cases still lie unsolved in Indian courts and how so many don’t even get there, but these flash momentarily at the bottom of the screen, ineffective and pointless.

Eventually every character in this film, which includes a cameo by Kashyap’s son-in-law Shane Gregoire playing an inmate who smuggles drugs in his nether regions, are all in a circus where the rules are written by patriarchy. Its not a “safe” film by any measure, is triggering in a 100 different ways, and the debates it might birth may even arguably be unnecessary. Do keep it on your radar though and lets discuss again when its available to watch!