The second half of Zoya Akhtar's segment in Lust Stories features a shot of Vicky Kaushal adjusting his pants while walking down a suburban hallway, and if I am honest, that clumsy little physical adjustment tells you more about middle-class male anxiety than twenty minutes of dialogue ever could. Let us get past the initial marketing storm that treated the Netflix anthology like some sort of radical rebellion against traditional Hindi cinema norms. It was simply four directors making mid-budget shorts about sex, or more accurately, about the complete absence of it, the weird power dynamics wrapped around it, and the absolute mess we make when we try to talk about desire without sounding like a health textbook. If you compare it to Bombay Talkies, which came out five years earlier with a similar multi-director structure, this newer batch feels significantly looser, less weighed down by the solemn duty of having to mean something profound for the culture at large. Karan Johar opens the proceedings with a wedding reception joke that hinges on a vibrator, setting up a tone of high-gloss camp that feels entirely divorced from the dirtier, quieter realities captured later by Dibakar Banerjee and Anurag Kashyap.

Kashyap's segment is the one where Radhika Apte plays a professor having an affair with a married colleague, and her performance relies heavily on unblinking stares and jagged sentence fragments that make everyone around her look slightly ridiculous. She does this thing with her mouth—holding her jaw rigid just after delivering a cutting line—that keeps you from ever fully relaxing into the drama. The direction here is breathless, almost jittery, with handheld cameras tracking characters through cramped apartments where every piece of furniture feels like an obstacle to an argument. You can practically smell the stale instant coffee and cheap room freshener in those scenes, which is a nice break from the immaculate, spotless kitchens that usually dominate modern Hindi films. Still, there is a weird editing choice right around the middle of her segment where a conversation about jealousy cuts away to a reaction shot of a ceiling fan, and it lingers for just a beat too long, throwing off the rhythmic snap of the argument. It is a small thing, but it bugged me every time the scene reset its momentum.

Then you drift over to Zoya Akhtar's corner, where Bhumi Pednekar plays a maid sleeping with her wealthy employer, and the script refuses to give you the easy moral outrage you might expect from a standard Bollywood movie dealing with class exploitation. Instead, it lingers in the gray, murky middle where transactions blur into something resembling affection, though neither character is brave enough to name it. Pednekar uses her eyes to register every shift in status within a room, shrinking slightly when guests walk in, standing just a fraction taller when she is alone with him. Vicky Kaushal matches her with a performance of total, blundering cluelessness, playing a guy whose wealth has insulated him from ever having to notice his own casual cruelty. They have this scene on a balcony where they discuss the logistics of meeting up next week, and the rhythm of their dialogue sounds genuinely improvised, full of awkward pauses, half-finished thoughts, and the kind of mundane distractions that kill romantic tension in real life. The cinematography here avoids the usual sun-drenched romance filter, favoring flat afternoon light that washes out their skin and makes the whole affair look distinctly unglamorous.

Dibakar Banerjee's contribution sits at the dark center of the project, starring Manisha Koirala and Sanjay Kapoor in a marital standoff that feels less like an exploration of infidelity and more like a psychological horror movie about getting older. Kapoor is terrifyingly good at playing a man who is completely blind to his wife's inner life, treating her discontent as a mild domestic inconvenience to be managed with golf trips and expensive dinners. Koirala doesn't have to do much besides stare out windows with a face carved out of old stone, yet she manages to project a cold, simmering fury that makes you wonder why she hasn't packed a bag and left years ago. The sound design in this segment is particularly oppressive, filled with the hum of air conditioners, the distant barking of neighborhood dogs, and the sickeningly loud crunch of dry toast being eaten in dead silence. It is not an easy watch, and it completely throws off the breezy, slightly voyeuristic vibe that Karan Johar establishes in the very first segment.

Speaking of Johar, his short film is the odd one out, relying on broad physical comedy and Kiara Advani pulling exaggerated faces while experiencing an orgasm during a family gathering. It belongs to a completely different cinematic universe than the rest of the project, playing like an extended sketch from a comedy television show rather than a serious dramatic experiment. The lighting is aggressively bright, every costume looks like it came straight off a high-end designer runway, and the background score hits every emotional cue with the subtlety of a sledgehammer. Yet, despite how out of place it feels, the segment highlights the sheer ideological range of contemporary commercial filmmaking in India, where the same platform can host both a glossy farce about female pleasure and a grim suburban chamber piece about marital rot.

What holds the whole messy package together is a shared refusal to wrap things up with a neat moral lesson, which makes the absence of a unifying thematic arc feel like a feature rather than a bug. Characters make terrible choices, hurt the people closest to them, and then wake up the next morning to make coffee and go to work as if nothing happened, because that is generally how life works when you are too tired to maintain a tragedy. The soundtrack throughout the anthology avoids the trap of generic romantic balladry, opting instead for sparse ambient tracks that bleed into the background rather than telling the audience how to feel. There are moments across all four stories that fall completely flat, and certain dialogue exchanges sound like they were written by someone who has never actually spoken to another human being in an informal setting. But when the performances click—like when Kaushal nervously shifts his weight from one foot to the other while trying to explain why he cannot leave his wife—the film captures a very specific, awkward truth about modern urban relationships that lingers in your head long after the screen goes black.