Agra (2025) [Movie Review] — A Bleak, Audacious Glimpse into Desire and Decay

Kanu Behl’s Agra is a Bollywood erotic psychological drama that refuses easy sympathy. Co-written with Atika Chohan, the film unfolds inside a cramped two-storey house where secrets metastasize into daily violence. Anchored by Mohit Agarwal’s disturbing central turn, the film is less a plot-driven spectacle and more a relentless mood piece — claustrophobic, uncompromising and often uncomfortable to watch. Rated 6.5/10, it will appeal to viewers who favor films that probe social taboos rather than console them.

Story & themes

Repression, patriarchy and the geography of loneliness.

At the centre is Guru, a call-centre employee whose yearning for privacy and intimacy clashes with a fractured household. The family’s physical division — mother downstairs, father upstairs with a second wife, and a liminal shared space in between — is a neat metaphor for emotional estrangement. Guru’s fantasies, nocturnal browsing of dating apps, and the slow corrosion of boundaries expose how desire and shame co-exist in an ordinary, suffocating environment. Behl uses the home itself as an active character: peeling paint, narrow corridors and stale routines all contribute to a sense that the family is trapped in expectations and decay. Themes of small-town claustrophobia, patriarchal hypocrisy, and the corrosive effects of repression are handled without didacticism; the film poses questions more than it provides answers.

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Performances

Bold, volatile and often unnerving acting that refuses to flatter.

Mohit Agarwal commits fully to a role that asks the audience to sit with ambivalence — his performance is at once pitiable and repellent, and it’s the film’s moral fulcrum. Priyanka Bose brings a quiet, tactile humanity to Priti, a widow who finds small, fragile ways of reclaiming desire; her moments are among the film’s most humane. Rahul Roy’s patriarch registers as weary and brittle, while Vibha Chhibber and Sonal Jha (as the two wives) convey lived exhaustion, anchoring the household’s emotional topography. The ensemble operates like a set of fractured mirrors: each reflection deepens the sense of entrapment.

Direction, script & craft

An intimate grammar of discomfort — precise, patient and perversely elegant.

Behl’s direction is clinical without being cold: long takes, deliberate framing and an almost documentary attention to detail create a lived-in world. The script by Behl and Chohan resists melodrama, preferring small, telling gestures that reveal character and history. Cinematography and production design turn the house into a pressure cooker, while the sound design amplifies the hum of domestic life into something ominous. At times, the film’s relentlessness feels punishing — intentionally so — and that stubborn refusal to soften the edges is both the film’s strength and a barrier for viewers seeking catharsis.

Final verdict & who should watch it

Uncomfortable, necessary — a film for those who want cinema that unsettles.

Agra is not entertainment in the conventional sense; it is a moral and sensory experience that lingers. It will reward viewers who appreciate uncompromising social realism and character studies that avoid tidy resolutions. The film’s honesty — even when it is ugly — is what makes it memorable: it neither absolves nor demonises its characters but lets their failings sit in plain view.

Recommended for mature audiences, fans of indie Bollywood and critics of contemporary social mores.

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Rating: 6.5/10 — brave filmmaking that asks for patience and an appetite for discomfort.