BANDAR — MOVIE REVIEW

📅 Released: June 5, 2026   |   🎭 Genre: Crime Drama / Prison Thriller   |   ⏱️ Runtime: 140 Minutes   |   🏭 Saffron Magicworks / Zee Studios

🔥 The Film That India Needed Someone to Make

Let's be honest about what Bandar is before anything else.

This is a film about a man who claims he did not do what he is accused of doing. Set inside India's MeToo era. Where the accused is a fading, ageing, painfully human male celebrity. Where the system is corrupt. Where the truth — deliberately, frustratingly, on purpose — is never fully established.

Anurag Kashyap has made a film that is going to make you deeply uncomfortable regardless of where you stand on gender politics, the MeToo movement, or the Indian legal system. And that discomfort is not an accident. It is the entire point.

"Hum sab apne circus ke bandar hain." "We are all monkeys in our own circus."

That line — delivered inside Taloja Jail — is the film's entire thesis in eight words. 🐒

🎬 Film Details

📖 The Story — What Is Bandar Actually About?

Samar Mehra (Bobby Deol) is a man at the most vulnerable point of his life. Once a recognisable television star — the kind of face that sold soap operas and celebrity appearances — he is now approaching 50 with a career in visible decline. His cultural relevance has quietly evaporated. He struggles to pay his servant's salary. The bank sends notices. He is not broke in the dramatic, cinematic sense. He is broke in the quiet, humiliating, everyday sense that is far harder to watch.

He finds company on a dating app — which is where he meets Gayatri (Sapna Pabbi). Their relationship is brief, physical, and careless in the way relationships between people who are using each other tend to be. When Gayatri's feelings deepen into something Samar did not sign up for — and she begins to show possessive, stalking behaviour — he does what many men do in that situation.

He ghosts her. Blocks her. Disappears without a conversation.

This is where the film turns. Gayatri, humiliated and enraged, files a rape complaint against Samar. The police — pre-conditioned to distrust Bollywood personalities and operate within a system where "aurat ne bola, No Means No" is the operational logic — immediately arrest him.

What follows is Samar's descent into the world of Taloja Jail. A world where prison overlord Lijo (Indrajith Sukumaran) controls every movement, every favour, every breath. Where a broken front tooth and a sobbed apology to a police officer are the currency of survival. Where the corrupt machinery on the outside — lawyers, officials, fixers — keeps him exactly where it wants him.

His sister Suhani (Sanya Malhotra) fights from the outside with everything she has. His girlfriend Khushi (Saba Azad) stays — but the relationship fractures under the weight of what he is accused of. And Samar, throughout all of it, maintains one position:

"Maine nahi kiya."

"I didn't do it."

The film never tells you whether he is telling the truth. And that is its most extraordinary, most infuriating, most courageous creative choice. 🎭

🎬 Direction — Kashyap at His Most Disciplined

Here is something worth saying about Anurag Kashyap that his loudest fans sometimes forget: his greatest films are not his most chaotic ones. They are his most disciplined ones. Black Friday — the most restrained film of his career — is also his finest. Ugly — stripped down, suffocating, merciless — is his most devastating.

Bandar belongs to that tradition. This is Kashyap at his most controlled.

The film is structured as a slow, deliberate squeeze. Every act tightens the walls around Samar a little further. The first act establishes his pre-prison life with deceptive ordinariness — Kashyap lets you get comfortable before pulling the rug. The second act inside Taloja Jail is where the film's atmosphere becomes its strongest character — Saiyed Shaaz Rizvi's cinematography choosing a palette of institutional grey, flickering tube lights, and the specific darkness of spaces designed to remove dignity.

The third act is where opinions will permanently divide. The ending does not provide resolution in any traditional sense. It does not vindicate Samar. It does not condemn Gayatri. It leaves you holding the question the film has been building for 140 minutes — and it trusts you to sit with it.

There is one creative decision worth discussing specifically: in the international TIFF cut of the film, a data slate at the end provided statistics about false rape allegations in India — giving the film an explicit statistical context that positioned it as a statement rather than a story. For the Indian theatrical release, Kashyap removed this slate entirely.

By removing it, he changed what the film is. Without the data slate, Bandar is not a statement about MeToo. It is a character study about a man inside a machine. The ambiguity is not a flaw. It is the architecture. 🎯

🌟 Performances — Bobby Deol Is Simply Extraordinary

Let's start with the obvious and the most important thing:

Bobby Deol is extraordinary in this film.

Not good. Not impressive. Not "surprisingly effective given his past roles." Extraordinary. Full stop.

Kashyap described the process with rare candour during the TIFF press conference:

💬 "Bobby himself said there was one day when he suddenly felt like his life was over, his career was over. From the age of 5, he knew he'd be a star. When he was reaching 40, somebody told him he needed to do acting workshops. Nobody taught him how to learn acting. It was a revival for him."

💬 "He played vulnerable. He totally put his whole vulnerable self out there. He said he was playing a person for the first time in his life — he was always playing a hero or a villain. And playing a person for the first time. He gave all of himself."

What you see on screen is the product of that giving. Samar Mehra is a deeply flawed man who behaved badly — not criminally, arguably, but badly — and who is now paying a price that may not fit the crime. The genius of Bobby Deol's performance is that he never plays Samar as a victim seeking our sympathy. He plays him as a person — bewildered, frightened, occasionally petty, occasionally brave — and lets the sympathy arrive on its own.

The moment he sobs, apologises to a cop over a slip of the tongue, and smiles dryly with a broken front tooth — you are completely in his corner and completely unsure whether you should be.

That is the highest level of acting. 🏆

Sanya Malhotra as Suhani — Samar's sister — is the film's emotional anchor outside the prison walls. Every scene she is in carries a specific quality of barely-contained fury — a woman watching her brother be destroyed by a system she cannot fight, fighting anyway. Her performance is ferocious in its restraint. Nothing is wasted. Every look, every pause, every moment of barely-suppressed breakdown is doing specific narrative work.

Sapna Pabbi as Gayatri is the film's most difficult role — and its most controversial one. She plays a woman whose accusation is framed as false, whose obsession is presented as menacing, and whose trajectory through the film takes her from sympathetic stalking victim to something the screenplay calls "a monster." It is a role that asks the audience to believe the male protagonist's version of events — and Pabbi performs the role with enough specificity and complexity to resist the simplest reading. Whatever Gayatri is, she is not a cartoon. She is a specific person who made specific choices. Whether those choices were motivated by trauma, vindictiveness, or something the film deliberately refuses to name — is left to the audience.

Indrajith Sukumaran as Lijo — the prison overlord — is chilling in the most specific, unglamorous way. He does not wield power dramatically. He wields it through bureaucracy, through favour-trading, through the quiet assertion of someone who knows exactly how much everything costs. The Subhash Ghai–Trimurti reference he delivers — which any Bollywood buff will catch immediately — provides one of the film's rare moments of pitch-black comedy that somehow makes the horror of his character worse rather than better.

🔥 The MeToo Question — What Is Kashyap Actually Saying?

This is the question the film is going to generate more debate around than any other. And it deserves a careful answer.

Bandar is, on its surface, a film about a man falsely accused under MeToo. This premise is, as one critic correctly noted, "a goldmine for the Right-Wing." In the wrong hands — with the wrong intentions — this could be a film weaponised to discredit the movement that gave voice to thousands of genuine survivors.

Kashyap's intentions, and more importantly his execution, are more complicated and more honest than that.

The film does not say MeToo is wrong. It does not say women lie. What it does say — very specifically — is that a legal system this corrupt, this indifferent to truth, this easily manipulated by wealth and political connection, cannot be trusted to produce just outcomes for anyone. The same system that has historically failed women is here shown failing a man. The critique is systemic, not gender-based.

The question "Usne kiya ya nahi kiya?" — "Did he do it or not?" — is asked by the audience the entire runtime. It is never answered. That deliberate refusal to answer is the film's most significant moral statement: we cannot know. We are not supposed to know. The film is not about innocence or guilt. It is about what happens to a person inside a machine that doesn't care about either.

⚠️ What Doesn't Fully Work

Bandar is not perfect. And Kashyap's most honest admirers know he never claims to be.

❌ The First Act Setup — Samar's pre-prison life is sketched rather than fully realised. His relationship with Gayatri happens quickly, his ghosting of her is almost offhand, and the escalation to a rape accusation arrives faster than it perhaps should. A little more time establishing this relationship — and the specific nature of what went wrong between them — would have given the moral ambiguity even deeper roots.

❌ The Loose Ends — Bollywood Hungama's review correctly noted that Samar's flat — threatened by bank notices in the opening act — is completely forgotten once he enters prison. What happened to it? Did his family handle it? Did he lose it? The film raises the financial pressure explicitly and then abandons it. Small thing. Noticeable.

❌ The Gayatri-Lawyer Connection — The subplot involving Samar's association with Gayatri's legal team and the question of who is orchestrating his continued imprisonment is handled in a somewhat bewildering way. The corrupt machinery is atmospherically convincing but procedurally murky in its specifics.

❌ The Ending — Divided Opinion Guaranteed — The film's final act and resolution (or deliberate non-resolution) will permanently divide audiences. Those who want a film to ultimately tell them what to think will leave frustrated. Those willing to hold the ambiguity — to carry the question home — will find it haunting rather than unsatisfying. Which camp you fall into is probably a reliable indicator of what kind of cinema you consume generally.

💬 What Critics & Audiences Are Saying

💬 "A relentlessly grim, needling statement on MeToo — Bobby Deol admirably depicts the despair and pathos of someone who is completely out of his depth." — Scroll.in

💬 "In a plot that is a goldmine for the Right-Wing, it's a mammoth task for Kashyap to not make Bandar come off as anti-women. He pulls it off." — FilmySasi

💬 "I walked out with one unsettling question — do men really have access to scream MeToo? And to Kashyap's credit — the film never answers it. Such a frustrating and haunting thought." — Koimoi

💬 "Powered by a marvellous, heart-wrenching performance by Bobby Deol. A shocking and disturbing story told with courage." — Bollywood Hungama ⭐⭐⭐½

💬 "Bobby's final monologue hides a devastating truth. The data slate removed from the Indian cut changes what the film means entirely." — Alt Bollywood

💬 "I didn't understand the ending the first time. I went back the next day. Then I understood it. Then I cried." — Letterboxd

💬 "Bobby Deol playing a person for the first time. His words. And you feel it in every frame." — Film critic

🏆 The Casting Masterstroke — India's Linguistic Reality Inside Prison

One detail that separates Bandar from every other Indian prison film deserves specific mention. Kashyap cast the jail population — the guards, the other prisoners, the institutional machinery — exclusively from theatre groups across different Indian states. Deliberately, specifically, to represent the linguistic diversity that actually exists inside Indian prisons.

The result: characters speaking Kannada (Raj B. Shetty, Natesh Hegde), Malayalam (Indrajith Sukumaran), Bengali (Riddhi Sen), Marathi (Ankush Gedam), Hindi, and English — all in the same corridors, all operating under the same brutal hierarchy.

This is what Kashyap means when he says "authenticity matters." It is not a slogan. It is a casting decision. 🎭

📊 Final Scorecard

📌 Final Verdict

🎯 Bandar is not a comfortable film. It was never going to be a comfortable film. Anurag Kashyap made a 140-minute question that he deliberately refuses to answer — about a man who says he didn't do it, inside a system that doesn't care whether he did or not, in an era where the word of a woman carries extraordinary moral weight and the word of an accused man carries almost none. Whether that is justice or its absence is exactly what the film wants you to argue about on the way home.

Bobby Deol has delivered the performance of his career — raw, vulnerable, stripped of every defensive layer that 30 years of Bollywood hero-playing had built around him. Sanya Malhotra is devastating in support. Indrajith Sukumaran is chilling without a single melodramatic moment. And Kashyap — working with Sudip Sharma's razor-sharp screenplay — has made something that will age better than almost everything else releasing this June.