Debanjan Dhar

Meta movies are tricky. The balance between sincerity and showiness is a constant negotiation. To what point can the filmmaker hold up to view the skeins of their work? When does this authorial mischief skid over into an unanchored experiment? Among India’s most consistently surprising, striking filmmakers working today, Don Palathara’s latest, Ekadesham (The Uncertainty Principle), is a vivid, scrambled drama, flitting between the folds of life, art, ambition, wishfulness and failure. Celebrating its Asia premiere at the Dharamshala Film Festival, the film doesn’t always stay grounded but remains curious, exploratory and eager to gauge its ruptures. Movies charged by a spirit to peck at their own edges are always an exciting proposition. Even their shortcomings reflect daring.

Jane Austen continues to speak vividly to our times. Her 1811 novel Sense and Sensibility met a brilliant, beloved match in Ang Lee’s 1995 benchmark adaptation with Emma Thompson and Kate Winslet. The challenge Georgia Oakley must have experienced while mounting her new adaptation is immense. But, for the most part, she conjures a drama of such freshness, buoyancy and emotional churn you can overlook the minor bumps, few jarring choices.

A decade after South Korean auteur Na Hong-jin took the world by storm with horror hit The Wailing, he returns with a demented monster movie. Hope premiered in Cannes Competition earlier this year, an audacious, eyebrow-raising outlier choice. Expectations are naturally immense. At its best, Hope is a thrilling demonstration of dynamite action filmmaking. But it’s also scraggly, unwieldy and prone to flat characterisation. Your experience will vary dramatically on certain expectations. As a big-scale apocalyptic outing, Hope is ambitious, frustrating, misjudged and yet genuinely surprising. That it can flit between so many things is in itself a total departure from the dead-eyed generic drudgery that hogs popular Hollywood blockbusters.

There’s something incredibly acute and sensitive in how Sandeep Kumar Paul’s debut, About An Intimate Matter, cuts through to scan a woman’s sense of self-worth amidst stifling social constraint. It knows the ever-morphing yardsticks foisted upon marginal bodies that are just thrust through one ring of damning perception after another. Financial autonomy preens itself as rescue but social gaping keeps jutting in. The heroine of Paul’s film, Swarna (Sreya Bhattacharya), is a self-possessed schoolteacher in a suburb in Bengal. She lives with her partner, Driti (Shimli Basu). Within the opening stretch, you get an inkling of her mettle, her quiet resolve. Amidst deliberations of her colleagues to petition for better working conditions, she dares to stand out.

In Vishwendra Singh’s debut feature, Khoriya, hope is a furtive, elusive thing. For migrants, their journeying is predicated on hope, which gets dashed again and again while they seize on some anchorage for the moment. The lives of such workers are fraught with abiding tension. What if the refuge shatters? The two Nepali half-brothers at Khoriya’s heart are up against India’s iron-grid social hierarchy that directs them to low expectations.

Digger is as depleting as films can get. Watching it is like being flogged mercilessly by its spitfire of self-aggrandising attitudes, a battery of dead metaphors. Alejandro G. Iñárritu is a self-indulgent filmmaker of some other bizarre dimension altogether. This isn’t a complaint. When an artist is as self-absorbed and thrilled by the import of their own statements and themes, it’s the ultimate act of inciting profound annoyance. It wants to say something about the dire state of the world, how we cope with the ever-increasing assault of horrors, the lavish, careless games of the uber-rich casually plunging civilisation into utter chaos. Is satire the only way to find some sort of release from the dread capitalism has forced upon the planet? Is it an evasion or the only honest, fitting response to grief and rage? All are welcome anxieties to examine. But Digger ploughs on and on with the kind of inflated self-regard that instantly spells doom for any undertaking. The final nail in the coffin is the coup casting of Tom Cruise.

Karthik Subbaraj’s Dorothy would like to believe that it has the kind of bravery that can singlehandedly cut wide open the possibilities of what mainstream Indian cinema can utter and traverse. There’s a swagger and bruised melancholy at its heart which almost seduces us. In its urgent, rallying reversals of the masculinity that trumpets itself through today’s cinema, Dorothy stands apart. Its eagerness to chart its own course, often unwieldy and turbulent and hypnotic, merits attention. Yet, it keeps chafing against its noble intentions. It opens against a landscape saturated with the violent, brutish excesses of men. We are plunged into the Madurai of the ‘90s. Even the flutters of a naïve friendship between two school boys, Subbu and Karthi, take place amidst bullying and the male prerogative to flex brawn.

Modernity arrives in several garbs all at once. It shifts between assimilation, a promise of progress and a threat of complete cultural loss. Development can wholly wash over a sharp sense of identity that once existed, chipping away at it one by one. Premiering in Platform competition at the Toronto International Film Festival 2026, Theja Rio’s brilliantly immersive debut, Angh, understands every shade of this complex negotiation. Rio, born in Nagaland’s Kohima, brings alive the state’s churning historical moment as Christianity burst in the 1960s. At the centre of the quiet, reflective drama is a tribal chief, Anghba (Anghlong Konyak). He’s a mournful witness to his community’s transformation under the sway of an American missionary (Douglas James Henshall). There’s a gentle ache in Angh that seeps under your skin, without a hint of rush.