Jaideep Ahlawat clears his throat about three minutes into the first segment of Ajeeb Daastaans, and the sound is wet, thick, and completely devoid of theatricality. If I'm honest, that small vocal tic tells you more about the character's suffocating domestic reality than twenty minutes of exposition ever could, setting a low-humming baseline of discomfort that the streaming anthology manages to sustain across its four disparate chapters without ever really buckling under its own prestige ambitions. Netflix has spent the last few years dumping these multi-director packages onto subscribers with varying degrees of success, but this particular curation avoids the usual whiplash of tone by anchoring nearly every single narrative in the muddy waters of entitlement, caste, and resentment. It is not a uniform piece of work, because anthologies never are, yet it holds together through a shared stubbornness about how people treat one another when nobody important is watching.

Kiran Rao's Dhobi Ghat comes to mind when watching the way urban spaces are used here not as backdrops but as active participants in the crushing alienation of the characters, though these directors are less interested in poetic urbanism and far more concerned with raw friction. Shashank Khaitan opens the batting with Khilauna, a suburban tragedy that looks at feudal power dynamics through the lens of a deaf girl and her loyal uncle, played by Abhishek Banerjee with a heartbreaking restraint that almost makes you forget the heavy-handed symbolism hanging over the construction site. Then comes Raj Mehta with Khajuraho, which feels like a misfire from minute one, leaning too hard into soapy melodrama while wasting Nushrratt Bharuccha on a role that requires her to cry on demand without giving her anything resembling an inner life. It's a small thing, but the color grading in that specific segment looks like it was yanked straight from a daytime soap opera, all blown-out highlights and oversaturated skin tones that clash violently with the darker impulses of the script. Neeraj Ghaywan steps up for the third and strongest piece, titled Geeli Pucchi, and suddenly the movie finds its actual pulse in a dusty shoe factory where Konkona Sen Sharma and Aditi Rao Hydari circle each other like wary predators who happen to be trapped inside the same rigid social hierarchy.

Fatima Sana Shaikh and Jaideep Ahlawat take over the fourth segment, directed by Kayoze Irani, and they turn a rather predictable premise about marital infidelity and hidden identities into a masterclass in unspoken tension. Shaikh wears a constant, defensive slouch that communicates years of feeling physically and socially out of place in her own home, while Ahlawat lumbers around her like an injured bear who doesn't know where to direct his rage. The framing keeps them slightly off-center in almost every two-shot, a deliberate choice that forces you to constantly scan the margins of the frame for reactions they are trying desperately to hide from one another. Hindi movies have traditionally struggled with adultery as anything other than a moral failing or a joke, but this segment treats it as a logistical headache born of profound loneliness, which feels infinitely more honest even when the plot contrivances start piling up near the end. Armaan Ralhan rounds out that triangle with a smooth, empty-eyed charm that works because he doesn't try to make the character likeable, understanding that rich suburban boys often coast through life on a combination of good tailoring and zero self-awareness.

The cinematography across the board leans heavily into natural light, sometimes to a fault, resulting in scenes where the actors' faces are swallowed by shadows that obscure vital micro-expressions. That visual choice works wonders in Ghaywan's segment, where the oppressive industrial gloom mirrors the emotional dead-end of the characters' lives, but it feels lazy in the suburban segments where it just looks like the gaffer forgot to turn on a fill light. The sound design does heavy lifting that the sparse musical scores often abandon, relying on the scrape of chairs, the distant hum of traffic, and the clatter of factory machinery to keep the viewer grounded in physical reality. Bollywood movies often use background scores as a crutch to tell the audience how to feel about a specific look or gesture, but here the directors frequently drop the music entirely, leaving the actors stranded in a silence that feels much longer than it actually is. That refusal to soften the blow with a swelling string section is where the film's modest power actually lies.

These are stories about people who feel entitled to things they haven't earned, whether that is affection, status, or basic human dignity, and the scripts rarely offer them the easy redemption that audiences usually demand from mainstream streaming fare. You are left sitting with the wreckage of bad decisions that cannot be undone by a tearful monologue or a third-act realization, which makes the lack of a tidy moral takeaway feel earned rather than frustrating. It is an uneven collection of shorts that overstays its welcome by at least thirty minutes, but the best stretches capture the petty cruelty of everyday existence with a scalpel-sharp precision that stays under your skin long after the credits roll.