The first thing that strikes you about Bandar is the title. It is blunt, uneasy, almost a slur - and by the time Anurag Kashyap's latest thriller reaches its halfway mark, you understand exactly why he chose it. Released in theatres on June 4, 2026, this 136-minute Hindi crime drama is not interested in easy heroes or clean villains. It is interested in what happens to a man when the system decides he is the animal in the room.
Bobby Deol plays Samar Mehra, a television star whose life looks, from the outside, like a well-lit set. That set collapses when his ex-girlfriend Gayatri Anand, played by Sapna Pabbi, accuses him of rape - a charge that lands after Samar cuts off contact with her. He is, by then, already in a new relationship with Khushi, Saba Azad's character, and the timing of the accusation becomes the film's most uncomfortable question. Kashyap and his writers refuse to answer it quickly. Instead, Samar is arrested, and the story shifts from a private mess to a public machinery.
What follows is a procedural that behaves like a nightmare. The justice system in Bandar is not broken in the dramatic, shouting-in-a-courtroom sense. It is broken quietly, through paperwork, delays, and men who have learned that procedure can be a weapon. Jitendra Joshi's Deore and Indrajith Sukumaran's Lijo hover around the investigation with the calm of people who know how these things end. Sanya Malhotra appears as Suhani Mehra, and her presence gives the film one of its few steadying forces, though steadiness, in Kashyap's world, is rarely protection.
The cast is unusually crowded for a film this tight. Raj B Shetty turns up as Lizard Man 1 - a name that tells you everything about the kind of underworld texture Kashyap is reaching for - and Ankush Gedam rounds out the ensemble as Bilaal. These are not decorative roles. The film's view of crime is ecological: everyone is connected to everyone, and guilt spreads like damp.
Deol's casting is the film's slyest move. An actor long associated with a certain stoic dignity is asked here to play a man whose dignity is stripped away piece by piece, and the film uses that familiarity against the audience. Samar is not obviously innocent. He is not obviously guilty. He is a celebrity who believed his charm was a kind of immunity, and watching that belief curdle is the engine of the movie.
Saba Azad's Khushi is written with more edge than the "new girlfriend" role usually allows, and Pabbi's Gayatri is never reduced to a plot device, which matters enormously given the accusation at the story's centre. The film is careful - sometimes frustratingly so - to keep both versions of the truth in play. The current TMDb rating sits at 5.45/10, and it is easy to see why the film divides people. Bandar does not offer the catharsis audiences often want from a Hindi crime drama. It offers discomfort, and it holds the position.
Kashyap's filmmaking remains restless. The camera finds sweat and fluorescent light and the particular ugliness of corridors. At 136 minutes, the film takes its time with procedure, and there are stretches where the accumulation of detail starts to feel like the point rather than the path. But that seems deliberate. This is a movie about a man being processed, and it wants you to feel the processing.
The title, by the end, reads less like an insult and more like a diagnosis. Bandar is a film about the distance between how a person is seen and what a person is, and about a system that profits from keeping that distance wide. It is not always easy company. It is not meant to be.
