Bollywood's wild side in 2025 - where quirky tales outshone the masala, and filmmakers dared to ditch the formula for something rawer.
2025 quietly became the year Bollywood stopped playing safe and started colouring outside the lines. While franchise sequels hogged the box office, a parallel Bollywood was quietly brewing - films shot on tight budgets, premiered at Cannes or Sundance, and released months later in India or straight to streaming. These weren't your three-hour, interval-friendly spectacles. They were uncomfortable, unsettling, and unapologetically real.
Homebound
Already making its premiere at the prestigious 78th Cannes Film Festival, Homebound has been selected as India's official entry for the 2026 Oscars.
Neeraj Ghaywan’s Homebound follows two migrant friends trying to get back to their village during the COVID lockdown, peeling back caste, class and friendship with an almost documentary stillness. Ishaan Khatter and Vishal Jethwa carry long, quiet stretches of the film, while Ghaywan turns highways, shelters and empty fields into a slow-burn nightmare rather than a conventional road movie.
Sister Midnight
Radhika Apte in Sister Midnight
With Radhika Apte as a woman unravelling in a cramped Mumbai flat, the film leans hard into surrealism - dream sequences, disorienting sound and shifting timelines - to explore mental health and domestic claustrophobia. It’s less about plot and more about mood, rewarding viewers who are willing to sit with ambiguity rather than chase tidy resolutions. Critics ate it up at festivals, calling it a fresh jab at everyday madness; it pulled in crowds who craved that indie edge over big-song spectacles.
Mahavatar Narsimha
Animated myth Mahavatar Narsimha became a sleeper phenomenon, earning over ₹200 crore worldwide and proving that experimentation can also be commercial. Mixing 3D animation with painterly textures and a darker, more psychological take on mythology, it nudged Hindi animation away from kiddie fare into something closer to adult fantasy epics
Girls Will Be Girls
Girls will be Girls made its premiere at the Sundance
Premiering at Sundance and later playing on the Indian festival circuit, Girls Will Be Girls reimagines the boarding-school movie from the point of view of a shy teenager and her equally confused mother. Shuchi Talati ditches glossy coming‑of‑age tropes for awkward silences, hormonal missteps and a rare, honest look at female desire in small-town India.
Santosh
Santosh, a newly widowed woman takes her husband’s constable job and is thrown into investigating a caste killing, turning a procedural into a patient character study. Delayed in India after a censorship tussle despite being the UK’s Oscar submission, the film uses long takes and minimal background score to show how violence seeps into everyday bureaucracy.
Together, these seven titles sketch a version of Bollywood that’s smaller in scale but far bigger in intent - more willing to sit with discomfort, to risk being misunderstood, and to experiment with form instead of chasing easy applause. Taken as a group, they suggest that the real future of Hindi cinema may not lie in the loudest franchise, but in these weirder, braver films quietly teaching audiences how to watch and feel differently.
But here's the rub: will studios chase profits or let creators roam? If 2025 taught us anything, it's that weird works, especially when it sneaks heart in with the strangeness.
