Kantara, described by its writer-director Rishab Shetty as “faith, culture, and devotion in all its glory,” isn’t standard Bollywood fare. For one thing, the film wasn’t made in Mumbai, India’s financial and entertainment capital. Nor is it targeted primarily at a Hindi-speaking audience.
Filmed in Kannada, a southern Indian language spoken by more than 50 million people, the story is about a mysterious forest — and the preternatural forces that reside in it. The overall experience is a bit like The Northman, except that the Viking legends have been replaced by homegrown deities and an animistic tradition of spirit worship that has spawned an art form. When they aren’t fighting a greedy landlord, forest dwellers dress up in colorful costumes and exotic headgear and enter a trance through their dance. That’s when they let out their bloodcurdling screams.
Kantara follows the commercial success last year of Pushpa 2: The Rule, a violent, stylized action drama about sandalwood smuggling, and Kalki 2898 AD, a futuristic dystopia. The two Telugu-language thrillers came out of Hyderabad in southern India. The Kantara franchise — the new movie is a prequel to a 2022 sleeper hit — is also from the south: It has been produced by a studio in Bengaluru, India’s outsourcing capital. What used to be confined earlier to the boundaries of regional cinema — with limited exhibition elsewhere — is now mainstream.
This is the new, multilingual Bollywood, and its main offering is fresh stories, set in new cinematic universes. They can be exotic folklore, or fantasy like Lokah Chapter 1: Chandra, a superhero franchise in Malayalam, another major southern Indian language. Meanwhile, the old Bollywood, the world’s most-prolific moviemaking industry, where big-name Mumbai entertainers delivered 5-billion-rupee-plus ($55 million) Hindi blockbusters to a pan-India audience, remains mired in an existential crisis, the kind I described in my review of 2024.
The numbers tell the story. Although audiences have finally shrugged off the pandemic blues and returned to theaters, for PVR Inox Ltd., the country’s biggest exhibitor, the high point of the September quarter was the 97% surge in collections from Hollywood hits like F1: The Movie, supplemented by a 110% jump in revenue from Kannada cinema. The haul from Malayalam films increased by 49%. Meanwhile, Hindi and Hindi-dubbed movies brought in just 4% more than the same period last year. Audiences no longer expect a Shah Rukh Khan, Aamir Khan, or Ranbir Kapoor blockbuster to hit the theaters around the annual Diwali festival. Quite literally, the language of Bollywood has changed.
The old industry is surviving on nostalgia. The song that Zohran Mamdani’s team played after he won the New York Mayoral race was Dhoom, from a Bollywood film by the same name — it was released 21 years ago.As southern India turns myths into money, and as Mumbai flounders with a fluke hit here and there, another kind of cinema, rooted in the lives of 1.4 billion Indians, is straining to be seen. One such movie is Homebound, based on a true story of two young village boys trying to become police constables amid an epidemic of youth unemployment. Beyond the security of a government job, the two friends, Chandan and Shoaib, are searching for dignity. Where Kantara offers the audience escape into a mythical past, Homebound — inspired by a 2020 New York Times article by the journalist Basharat Peer — forces them to confront an ugly reality of the present: caste.
At Homebound’s New York premiere in November, director Neeraj Ghaywan explained caste with an analogy from the pandemic. To be born a Dalit, the lowest rung of the hierarchical social order, is to be gaslit into believing that one is infected with an incurable virus. What comes next is unending social, educational, and occupational discrimination. Chandan wouldn’t disclose his family name to outsiders because his caste identity is seared into it. For fear of abandonment by his peers, Ghaywan, himself a Dalit, used to do the same. “We’ve been socially distanced for 2,000 years,” the director said in a chat with Martin Scorsese, who helped produce the film. “We’re never told why.”
Millions of families on the fringes of the society will identify with the struggle, though they’ll perhaps never get to watch India’s entry in the best international feature film category at the upcoming Academy Awards.
Local theaters have no use for realism. Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light won last year’s Cannes Grand Prix and was nominated for two Golden Globes, but the economics of movie exhibition favored escapist fantasies over a story of two nurses from Kerala sharing rooms in Mumbai. The most recent Bollywood hit, which has overshadowed Kantara’s success, cashes in on this year’s military hostilities with Pakistan by serving up a gory revenge plotline in the garb of a spy thriller. Dhurandhar has reportedly been banned in much of the Middle East.
Arthouse cinema everywhere grows in the crevices of popular culture. In India, however, a paucity of public funds is no longer the only hurdle. Ticket prices have gone up more than 50% in three years. Public perception of what’s worth watching is being distorted by manipulated social-media reviews and inflated box-office figures, deepening a crisis of credibility for the $60 billion industry, AFP reported in November.
Instead of helping, streaming services like Netflix and Amazon Prime have “homogenized our worst tendencies of making bets on films,” Shaunak Sen, an Oscar-nominated indie filmmaker, told the Hindustan Times recently.
One hopes that movies like Homebound will have better luck finding an audience in 2026, even though the anguish that they bring to the screen — contemporary, urgent, and silent — may be no match for the loud screams of Kantara.
The views published here are the author’s own, and not EconomicTimes.com’s
