Anurag Kashyap has a lot on his mind. His latest film, Monkey in a Cage (or Bandar, as it will be known to audiences in India), takes on multiple things he’s concerned about—cancel culture, a fraught post-#MeToo social landscape, and India’s flawed judicial system—and weaves them together into something too muddled and misguided to hold water. “I had a massive issue with this whole cancel culture, where there is no chance given to a person,” said Kashyap at the film’s premiere at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival. “I grew up in a world where we made mistakes and we were given opportunities to redeem ourselves or correct ourselves… Today, the world is not the same.”
The film stars Bobby Deol as Samar Mehra, a washed-up actor whose relevance has been reduced to performer-for-hire at weddings. He can’t afford back surgery and is about to default on mortgage payments when his problems suddenly get much worse. Cops show up unexpectedly at his door one night and arrest him on charges of rape, filed by a woman named Gayatri (Sapna Pabbi) whom Samar claims to have met on a dating app and gone out with a few times.
At first, there’s plenty the movie handles well. Deol plays Samar with a perpetual hangdog expression, establishing him right from the start as a man who doesn’t know how to handle his own problems and has never had to face the consequences of his actions. Little vignettes of his past interactions with Gayatri pepper the film, offering intriguing clues but no clear answers as to his guilt or innocence. The uncertainty is a smart choice as it nods to how challenging it can be to litigate cases of sexual assault, which often rely solely on victim testimony. In the absence of witnesses or evidence, acquittals are common (in India, the conviction rate hovers around 27 to 28 per cent).
Yet the team behind Bandar seems more perturbed by the possibility of false rape allegations rising in India. (The number of false rape cases filed in 2024 is included in a list of stats that appears at the end of the film, along with a figure about “undertrials” in Indian prisons, who often spend decades behind bars before they make it to their first hearing.) In an interview with Variety, Kashyap cites a newspaper article he came across about false rape cases, which served as a key impetus for the film. “There was rampant misuse of new laws, cases of one woman filing eight different cases in eight different police stations with the help of a lawyer and a policeman,” he said.
The team’s joint concerns about false rape cases and the plight of India’s undertrials dovetail in the film once Samar is sent to jail. The film is unflinching in its portrayal of an overcrowded Indian prison, where daily humiliations and injustices are the norm. Word of the charges against him spreads quickly and soon other prisoners who have also been accused of rape sidle over to confide in him, earnestly sharing stories of their own alleged entrapment and innocence. It’s an effective way to showcase the self-mythologising that most perpetrators of violent crime engage in to absolve themselves of blame or guilt.
In a post-#MeToo world, plenty of films have tackled sexual assault allegations and their fallout—be it on social media, in private or in public—with success. One that navigates these tricky waters brilliantly is Anand Ekarshi’s Malayalam film Aattam, which won the Best Feature Film at the 70th National Film Awards last year. The film unfolds as a 12 Angry Men-style deliberation amongst a theatre troupe when the sole female member of the group accuses one of them of assault. A group of men convening to pass a verdict on this crime on behalf of a woman is presented with irony, and offers an opportunity for each of the men to reveal their biases and hypocrisies over the course of their discussion.
Kashyap’s men are also written with a layered approach, making the thin characterisation of his female lead feel even more stark by contrast. No effort is made to show things from her perspective or to offer a counter-narrative to what is unfolding on screen.
Though Kashyap brought on a woman co-director, Sakshi Mehta, to shoot Gayatri’s scenes, there’s nothing in the final product that reflects a different gaze at work.
Despite its stated premise, the film doesn’t actually engage with cancel culture. There’s no attempt to examine the repercussions of the accusation against Samar, either through media coverage of his case or its impact on his professional relationships. Most frustratingly, any ambiguity and complexity built up by the film is abandoned in favour of a black-and-white ending that relies on simplistic and regressive tropes about women to neatly tie up the story.
There are other films that have taken a more nuanced approach, some even predating Hollywood’s post-Weinstein reckoning. In 2012, Danish film The Hunt, starring Mads Mikkelsen, thoughtfully addressed the dangers of groupthink and the inherent injustice of trials in the court of public opinion, via a lead character who is wrongfully accused of child abuse. Then in 2019, The Assistant, starring Julia Garner, looked at the network of complicity around a predator and the culture of silence that contributes to unsafe working environments for women. Tar (2022), for which Blanchett was nominated for an Academy Award, shows her play a problematic hero, whose position in the power structure enables her to push the boundaries of appropriate behaviour.
There are many ways that Kashyap and his writers could have approached this film differently; perhaps most importantly, by offering a well-rounded female character with more complex motivations. Despite its earnest attempts to address flaws in India’s judicial process, the great failing of Bandar is in its decision to legitimise the spectre of false rape allegations. In a country where a rape is reported every 16 minutes—a figure that is certainly much higher in actuality, due to chronic under-reporting—it feels particularly irresponsible to make a film undermining this very real problem by casting aspersions on the veracity of these charges. “It was an extremely difficult film to make because we were walking a very thin line,” said Kashyap. “I don’t really have very clear answers because the film is meant to be a conversation starter.”
There are certainly conversations to be had about the grave miscarriages of justice that occur with regularity in India. Unfortunately, this film expends a lot of energy focusing on the wrong ones.
