Bandar (2026)
Original title: बंदर
Bandar is a 2026 Hindi-language thriller movie directed by Anurag Kashyap, with a running time of 2h 20m. It stars Bobby Deol, Sanya Malhotra and Saba Azad.
Anurag Kashyap builds this crime thriller around Samar, an aging television star whose public image is his only real asset. When he cuts off his ex-girlfriend Gayatri and she accuses him of rape, the machinery around him, the police, the courts, the people who profited from his fame, turns cold and transactional. Bobby Deol plays the fading celebrity; Sanya Malhotra, Saba Azad, and Sapna Pabbi move through the fallout. The Hindi title means monkey, and the film watches its subject squirm inside a system that has no interest in truth, only in leverage. The script is inspired by a real case.
Quick answers
What is Bandar about?
Anurag Kashyap builds this crime thriller around Samar, an aging television star whose public image is his only real asset. When he cuts off his ex-girlfriend Gayatri and she accuses him of rape, the machinery around him, the police, the courts, the people who profited from his fame, turns cold and transactional. Bobby Deol plays the fading celebrity; Sanya Malhotra, Saba Azad, and Sapna Pabbi move through the fallout. The Hindi title means monkey, and the film watches its subject squirm inside a system that has no interest in truth, only in leverage. The script is inspired by a real case.
When was Bandar released?
Bandar was released on 5 June 2026.
How long is Bandar?
Bandar runs 2h 20m.
Who made Bandar?
Bandar was directed by Anurag Kashyap.
Cast
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A few thoughts on Bandar
Kanae Minato's Confessions works the same cold register, a revenge story delivered through calm, damning testimony. Herman Koch's The Dinner (Het Diner) shares the appetite for watching respectable people rationalize the unforgivable over a polite surface. Kotaro Isaka's Grasshopper adds the pulp underworld texture where nobody's motives stay clean.
When an accusation turns everyone around you transactional
Bandar watches a fading star's allies go cold the moment a rape allegation lands, each of them calculating leverage instead of truth. These stories share that chill, where a respectable surface cracks under scandal: the dinner-table cover-ups of Het Diner and Confessions, the marital fraud of Cheat and Compulsion, and the power games of Hate Story 3.
Crime stories where truth loses to leverage
Anurag Kashyap frames Bandar around a system that wants an angle, not a fact. These crime dramas run on the same moral fog, where cops, suspects and killers all bargain in the gray: the obsessive detective of Decision to Leave, the gang politics of New World, the vengeance of I Saw the Devil, and the buried guilt of Monster and The Great Hypnotist.
Lovers whose fallout turns predatory
The trigger in Bandar is an ex-girlfriend the star cut loose. These thrillers trace how intimacy curdles into threat, from the affair that unravels a marriage in Unfaithful to the captive dread of Until Death, the flipped-script hunt of Strange Darling, the stalker in Fear, and the gaslit terror of The Invisible Man.