Sunday, 04 January 2026
Sunday, 04 January 2026
Amidst the crowd of big-budget tentpole movies from Hollywood banners, several small, indie films made a splash at various film festivals in 2025. However, these films haven’t had a release in India yet. Here are six indie films we’re eagerly waiting to watch legally —- be it in theatres or on OTT — in India in 2026.
Hamnet
Four years after helming Marvel’s Eternals, the two-time Academy Award winning director Chloe Zhao returns with a period drama tracing the grief that led to the creation of one of literature’s greatest tragedies. Based on Maggie O’Farrell’s bestselling 2020 novel, Hamnet follows the courtship and marriage of William Shakespeare (Paul Mescal) and Agnes Hathaway (Jessie Buckley), and the devastating loss of their 11-year-old son, Hamnet (Jacobi Jupe). The story imagines how that tragedy shaped Shakespeare’s later works, particularly Hamlet.
Sentimental Value
Directed by Joachim Trier, Sentimental Value follows the story of two sisters Nora (Renate Reinsve) and Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) who are forced into an uneasy reunion with their estranged father Gustav (Stellan Skarsgård), a once-celebrated filmmaker whose long absences and alcoholism left deep scars. When he returns to Norway following the death of their mother, old resentments resurface, bound up with a family home heavy with history and unspoken trauma. The film had its world premiere at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Grand Prix.
No Other Choice
Park Chan-wook adapts Donald E. Westlake’s crime novel into a thriller headlined by Lee Byung-hun as a corporate employee pushed to the wall. After being abruptly dismissed from the paper company he devoted 25 years to, Man-su finds himself in a desperate scramble for survival, one that forces him on a mission to wipe out rival job seekers.
A longtime admirer of pulp storytelling, Park preserves the novel’s paper-industry backbone while bringing it firmly into the present. Park has always excelled at exposing the rot beneath polite surfaces, and this film promises a slow-burn reckoning.
Die My Love
Few filmmakers explore psychological collapse as viscerally as Lynne Ramsay. Die My Love, adapted from Ariana Harwicz’s novel, dives into postpartum depression, and how that unravels a young mother’s (Jennifer Lawrence) relationship with her husband (Robert Pattinson). Ramsay doesn’t offer any easy empathy. Instead, she confronts the audience with the turmoil that goes on inside the protagonist’s head.
It Was Just An Accident
Jafar Panahi’s cinema has always been an act of rebellion. It Was Just An Accident continues his exploration of power using deceptively simple situations to expose larger truths about authority and survival. The film is about former Iranian prisoners who must decide whether they want to take revenge on a man they think tortured them. The film premiered at the 78th Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Palme d’Or.
The Secret Agent
The Secret Agent is a neo-noir, period thriller written and directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho that follows the story of Armando (Wagner Moura), a former academic as he tries to escape persecution from military rule in Brazil. The film premiered in competition at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, where it won several awards including Best Actor for Moura, Best Director for Mendonça Filho, along with the Art House Cinema Award and the FIPRESCI Prize for Best Film.
