There’s a point in Bandar where you stop watching it like a film and start watching it like a long, uncomfortable argument you can’t quite walk away from. That feeling doesn’t come from shock value alone. It comes from how insistently Anurag Kashyap keeps the camera fixed on a man who is falling apart. And asks you to stay with him, even when you’re not sure what you’re supposed to feel.
At the centre of it all is Samar Mehra, played by Bobby Deol. Once a known face on the big screen, he is now reduced to small gigs and smaller rooms. The film introduces him at a wedding performance where he still behaves like someone used to attention. There’s a brief moment where he smiles at a group of women with phones, thinking they’re clicking him. They aren’t. That’s the film in one shot: someone still reaching for a spotlight that has already moved on.
Samar is broke, tired, and living with a kind of everyday confusion that comes from losing your place in the world. His girlfriend (Saba Azad) is younger, more stable in her own way, but the relationship feels like it’s holding him together with a frayed thread. His sister (Sanya Malhotra) is the only one who still speaks to him like a functioning adult, even when she’s clearly exhausted by him.
Then one fine evening, he’s arrested.
A woman accuses him of rape.
Samar says it was a relationship that turned ugly after he pulled away. She says it was something else entirely. The film doesn’t rush to settle that question. Instead, it drags him through the system that follows — the police station, the questioning, the reading out of private messages like they’re public property. A slow stripping away of privacy, we’ve seen play out in recent times.
Then comes prison, and the film tightens its grip.
Inside the jail, everything is reduced to survival. Space, dignity, identity — none of it is guaranteed. New inmates are broken down quickly, not always through violence, but through control. Who eats where. Who sleeps where. Who gets to speak. Even the accused become a category before they become individuals.
It’s here that Samar changes. Not in a big cinematic way. In small things. The way he stands. The way he stops arguing so much. The way he starts listening more than speaking. Bobby Deol plays it without trying to earn sympathy. That’s probably why it works. Samar doesn’t feel like a man being written into tragedy. He feels like someone slowly running out of ways to hold himself up.
The supporting cast does what it can around him. Jitendra Joshi leaves a mark as the police officer handling the case. Saba Azad and Sanya Malhotra are important emotionally, but the film doesn’t always give them enough room to breathe or push back against Samar’s story in a meaningful way.
And then there’s Gayatri (Sapna Pabbi) — the accuser. We just get to know bits and pieces about her, not enough to understand her fully. That absence starts to matter. Not because every character needs equal sympathy, but because the film is asking us to sit inside a moral mess and only shows us one half of it in detail.
That’s where the film starts leaning in a direction it doesn’t fully acknowledge.
It begins as a story about accusation, public perception, and the damage systems can do once they decide someone is guilty before trial. But slowly, the emotional weight shifts almost entirely onto Samar. His suffering becomes the centre of gravity. Everything else starts orbiting it.
There is a moment where he admits he may have hurt her emotionally. It briefly opens a door. But the film doesn’t stay there long. It steps back into his suffering again, and stays there.
That choice changes how the film lands.
Because this isn’t a simple story. It can’t be. It’s dealing with something where both truth and misuse of truth exist in the same space. And when a film leans too far into one side of that space, it stops feeling like it’s exploring and starts feeling like it’s steering.
That the film takes the side of men is evident in the backstories of other inmates in the prison — from a father-in-law ‘accused’ of rape by his daughter-in-law out of the house, to a construction worker who claims he was framed. He even blames the short clothes of the victims and says the actual rapist must have had a good time!
And even when the film ends, what remains isn’t a neat conclusion. It’s an image: a man slowly losing his sense of self inside a place that has already decided what he is.
Bandar works best when it shows systems doing what they always do: grind people down without needing to justify themselves. Where it stumbles is in deciding whose pain the story ultimately belongs to.
In a post #MeToo world, where many women have found the courage to come out publicly and speak about abuse, Bandar takes the side of a man. And that’s where Anurag Kashyap’s film about systemic rot stumbles.