Gone are the days when we saw Amol Palekar, Vidya Sinha, Rekha, Vinod Mehra, and many more, in Basu Chatterjee, Sai Paranjpye movies that made us, the average Indian, feel represented on screen. Now, government agents and dysfunctional Romeos have left us craving for the simple, middle-class movie.
23-year-old Abhinav Jha, who used to love going to the theatres, is finding it hard to remain loyal, because he can’t connect to the characters on screen. Pic/Shadab Khan
There’s a particular kind of silence that follows a big, noisy blockbuster these days. It’s not awe, nor satisfaction, just a faint hollowness. Crowds spill out of theatres still buzzing with the aftershocks of films like Animal, Baaghi 4, Tere Ishq Mein with its stalker-as-lover template, or the newly minted Dhurandhar, where jingoism and pulverised bodies do most of the talking. The sound fades, but nothing stays. No moment that feels borrowed from real life, no line that follows you home.
That ache bothering you inside is what filmmaker Aditya Kripalani recently articulated in a post on Instagram. A longing for stories about the things people actually wrestle with — the cost of surviving a city, the courage it takes to dream, the clumsy ways we love our parents, siblings, and partners. Stories about failing, trying again, and returning home with some small piece of clarity. “I feel I’m unable to bring anything back home from the theatre anymore,” he wrote. The takeaway has vanished.
And it leaves behind the question of what happens when a country’s most popular cinema stops reflecting the emotional landscape of the people watching it?
For someone like Abhinav Jha, the theatre used to feel like a second home. He’s 23, a filmmaker who grew up pirating obscure world cinema as a teenager, spending weekends in dark auditoriums with his parents, and later working on ad sets between his freelancing. “Filmmaking and watching cinema is part of my daily routine,” he says — a line that, in another time, would announce a lifetime of loyalty to the big screen.
Aditya Kripalani, filmmaker
The loyalty is fraying. “I’ve seen myself visit the theatre less often because it’s the same narrative being rewritten and re-screened,” he says. The “same narrative” isn’t vague for him. It’s the parade of chest-thumping blockbusters, like Kabir Singh, Pushpa, RRR, Pathan, War and much more. He still watches them, but from the outside, looking for clues. “Since I’m someone who is deeply political, I try to reflect on why this is happening.”
Jha’s reading of the moment is blunt, in which economic despair, joblessness, rising community conflict, and a general sense of insecurity have created perfect conditions for hyper-masculine, nationalistic heroes. “People investing in these films understand the sentiment,” he says. “They see cinema as a product and less as a work of art.” He draws a clean line between today and the 1970s. “The angry young man then was trying to fight the system. Now the aggression protects the status quo. It’s a negative cycle being perpetuated.”
For Abhinav Jha, the cinema theatre used to feel like a second home, but now that loyalty is shaking due to lack of fresh and hatke movies. Pic/Shadab Khan
The fatigue that Jha feels as an audience member is something Kripalani sensed from the inside long before it became visible in weekend box office graphs. “The people that I see on the screen nowadays, I can’t relate to their lives at all,” he says. “I’m not a historical king, or a government agent.”
In the ’90s, the era that made him fall in love with Indian cinema, characters were aspirational but still recognisable. Today, he says, the gap between his lived life and the projected life is almost surreal. “My everyday life is about inflation, money, not being able to put my work out. Common man issues are no longer represented in the media.” Even the films that claim to be “real,” he says, look like “fantasy because of how unreal it looks.”
Parth Kelkar, an animation producer and content creator, talks about how audiences crave legitimacy along with gentleness in films now. Pic/M Fahim
For Kripalani, this drift isn’t accidental. He links it to the corporatisation of the industry and a subtle but powerful alignment with the political mood. “A lot of the films are being funded by major corporate houses which will have to align with the government agenda. So a lot of our films show that there is nothing wrong with the country. And how do they prove that? By producing films staged at conflicts happening in other countries.”
What he hears from viewers of his own work is startling in its simplicity. They want tenderness. “Human connection and life that feels real,” he says. Masculinity itself doesn’t bother him; it’s the flattening of it into one loud, muscular register. “Masculine has an equal space, but the portrayal is limited. The only reason for this hyper-testosterone [atmosphere] is because you are choosing stories like that.” Kripalani’s voice is of a filmmaker observing a widening gap between ordinary life and the fantasies that claim to represent it — a gap that audiences feel but rarely articulate.
Ashwiny Iyer Tiwari, Aditya Kripalani and Eshita Samson Sathe
By the time the conversation reaches Eshita Samson Sathe, a 21-year-old psychology student who plans her free time around trailers and Sunday screenings, it has shifted from political to deeply personal. For her generation, raised on YouTube teasers, and family rituals around 3 Idiots, movies were meant to be a form of rest. The theatre was a soft corner of the week, not another arena of adrenaline. “I really like watching films,” she says. “I watch a lot of trailers. But lately I’m not looking forward to any of the films because it’s frustrating. It’s the same type of plot being repeated again and again.” For her, early 2000s cinema sits like a warm blanket in contrast. “I’ve grown with those films. As someone struggling with life choices, movies now don’t provide comfort. You’re already stressed, and then you get more agitated because of these movies. They are injurious to us.” That word, injurious, hangs heavy. She remembers films that talked openly about family, relationships, confidence, even suicide prevention. “It used to feel like a hug,” she says.
The new theatrical experience is more of a punch. “Nowadays movies are nothing but violence and plotting murders. You decide you want to relax and go watch a movie and the first thing you see is a murder scene. And you’re sitting there thinking, ‘How did I end up here watching this sh*t?’” She laughs at her own exasperation, but the fatigue underneath is clear. “There is no comfort in the movies anymore. It’s always propaganda or hyper-patriotic content. It’s crazy. Give me a break!” Sathe is proof that when cinema forgets softness, it loses an entire generation looking desperately for refuge in the dark.
Director and writer Ashwiny Iyer Tiwari has spent a decade pulling poetry out of auto stands, school corridors, and small-town living rooms. She is also someone who refuses to believe that that tenderness has vanished from Indian cinema. To her, the space for intimacy hasn’t collapsed; it has simply moved. “Poetry in the language of storytelling plays a very important role,” she says. “I don’t think the space has shrunk, tightened perhaps. Content-led films always find their audience. Everyday poetry doesn’t disappear; it just migrates.”
Her examples come readily with Laapataa Ladies, which snowballed through word of mouth, or the recent Saiyaara, which travelled far beyond expectations. Spectacle may dominate the marquee, but connection still carries farther. “When a film connects at that level, it travels further than any spectacle,” she says. The real challenge, she adds, is persuading stakeholders not to judge a film only by its opening weekend. Tiwari doesn’t deny that economics has tightened the room. What gives her hope is what she’s just seen at Goa’s Waves Film Bazaar. Young filmmakers pitching astonishingly tender stories, and established creators willing to back them. “I don’t think things are as black and white anymore,” she explains. “Everyone is experimenting and collectively we encourage young storytellers.”
Parth Kelkar looks at the current line-up of loud blockbusters with the eye of someone who understands both the spreadsheet and the storyboard. As an animation producer, he watches trends with a technician’s irritation — not at the testosterone itself, but at the sloppiness that so often accompanies it. He is also a content creator discoursing about films on Instagram, allowing him to have insights that perhaps regular audiences miss.
Audiences, he insists, are not just craving gentler stories; they are craving legibility. “Plots that make sense, dubbing that matches lips, dialogues that don’t sound like they were written by someone pretending to be human,” he says. So much of mainstream cinema, in his view, sacrifices “core human experiences” for fantasies no real person has or wants. His economic diagnosis is blunt. “We as a country unfortunately have a ‘baniya mentality’,” he says. “We have to count the note and if it doesn’t add up we do not care about the art. We still have that stigma where we do not think that art is a valuable pursuit especially if it is loss-making.”
Beneath the bombast, filmmakers are still writing toward the small, stubborn truths that audiences keep craving. Tiwari offers the clearest compass, insisting this isn’t an extinction but a phase shift. “A film doesn’t have to be loud, it just needs to be made with heart and positioned honestly,” she says, pointing toward a future with flexible financing, better exhibition, and fewer genre boxes. When the industry finally trusts authenticity again, perhaps our cinema will begin to lead us as well.
The mind feels what it sees
Shivam
Shivam, an emotional-intelligence coach, reads the current wave of hyper-masculine, nationalistic cinema as both mirror and accelerant. Films built on dominance, he argues, “remit your emotional vocabulary,” reducing everything to anger, pride and jealousy. When audiences see only those states portrayed, “naturally, their world moves accordingly.” The softer emotions like kindness, empathy, fear, vulnerability vanish from the screen and, over time, from personal repertoires. Men, who already grow up with a socially restricted emotional range, get their limits reinforced. Hyper-aggressive heroes signal that only power matters, fuelling disconnection in relationships and, at the extreme end, “crimes caused due to emotional suppression and emotional disturbance.” For Shivam, the cultural cost of these narratives is our shrinking ability to recognise ourselves.
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