Saira takes the sexual fantasies she has written into a classroom of women. A literature professor in 1987 Hyderabad, she admires Manto’s frankness and believes that erotic writing deserves to be judged by the quality of its expression.
In Vishal Bhardwaj’s Chulbuli Begum, that belief becomes personal practice. Teaching gives her an unusual position within a story about female desire: she can write it, interpret it, and place it before an audience. The classroom makes her imagination discussable, even as her marriage leaves her wanting a response that literary understanding cannot supply.
Bhardwaj moves between literary expression and popular cinema without treating either as an embarrassment. His Hyderabadi Hindi and sexual wordplay give Saira’s experiment a local comic vocabulary, while Siddharth’s towel-clad fantasy appearance borrows the recognizable image of Ranbir Kapoor in Saawariya.
For viewers unfamiliar with that reference, its function is still readable: the male body becomes a spectacle arranged for a woman’s pleasure. Saira gets to imagine her doctor husband differently from the man she encounters in married life. The parody makes that difference funny while allowing her fantasy to retain its sensual appeal.
Aditi Rao Hydari gives the segment its emotional continuity. Her Saira enjoys the possibilities of her imagination, yet intellectual confidence does not spare her the discomfort of exposing what she wants. Hydari allows pleasure, mischief, and uncertainty to occupy the same character.
Siddharth’s exuberance supplies the comic counterpart, particularly when the fantasy version of the husband departs from his reluctance to indulge her wishes. Bhardwaj’s broad treatment works because the exaggeration belongs to Saira’s imaginative activity. A man prancing in a towel can be ridiculous and desirable within the same scene; she need not choose a respectable response.
This freedom of expression is the most productive thread running through Lust Stories 3, Netflix’s four-film anthology directed by Bhardwaj, Vikramaditya Motwane, Kiran Rao, and Shakun Batra. Its characters find different ways to give desire a form, drawing on books, television, familiar film plots, and repeated physical encounters.
Motwane’s Goonay Goonay offers a particularly useful companion to Saira’s literary experiment. Two women in Kandivali, a Mumbai suburb, take inspiration from a Korean drama and propose swapping husbands. Popular entertainment provides an idea they can entertain together before having to confront its implications within their own marriages.
Konkona Sen Sharma and Radhika Apte play the friends, with Abhishek Banerjee and Vijay Varma as their husbands. The setting matters because the experiment enters an established network of marital familiarity and friendship. These people already have expectations about one another, and the proposal unsettles the security those expectations provide. Apte’s nervous giggles make the gap between curiosity and confidence visible.
Her laughter keeps interrupting any impression that wanting an adventure means being prepared for it. An admission of shame about feeling shame gives the dialogue a similarly uncomfortable precision: even embarrassment becomes something the women feel they ought to have overcome.
The Korean influence therefore acquires its meaning through the couples’ responses. Jealousy and wounded pride resist the apparent simplicity of borrowing an idea from television. Motwane also lets the friendship carry pressure, since longstanding intimacy can encourage people to assume agreement before it has been given.
The movement from comedy toward sentiment gives the experiment emotional consequences, although warmth cannot settle every tension the premise creates. Banerjee and Varma’s insecurity keeps the men involved as vulnerable participants. The women’s initiative changes the terms of the relationships, then leaves all four negotiating what that change has exposed.
Kiran Rao’s One By Two takes a different route through the repertoire of Hindi popular cinema. Gurfateh Pirzada plays twins involved in drug smuggling, both drawn to a nail artist played by Sana Thampi. Doubled identities, attraction, and criminal complications provide a ready supply of reversals.
The pleasure comes from letting these mechanisms interfere with one another: sexual interest threatens an operation that depends on cooperation. Rao’s working-class Mumbai setting and its migrant ambitions give the plotting a social location, while the inclusion of rap places a contemporary musical form beside the familiar twin-story machinery.
The difficulty lies in how quickly attraction becomes useful to that machinery. As romance gives way to danger and deception, desire increasingly serves the business of producing another turn. The nail artist’s involvement allows opportunism to enter the relationship from both sides, but the accumulating twists compete with the sexual curiosity that initially animates the premise.
The segment has an enjoyable willingness to play with commercial conventions. Its limitations become apparent when the crime story can keep moving without developing an equally precise understanding of what these people want from one another.
Batra’s Can’t Get Enough finds that precision in repetition. Sailee and Varun, played by Radhika Madan and Ali Fazal, are preparing for divorce but continue sleeping together. Their attraction survives the deterioration of their ability to live together, creating temporary periods of closeness inside an ongoing separation.
Madan’s defensiveness and exposed hurt make Sailee’s return to Varun understandable without making it reassuring. Fazal sustains the tenderness that complicates her anger. An awkward sexual encounter is important here: even the activity they keep returning to cannot be relied upon to suspend their difficulties cleanly.
Sailee’s objection to Varun’s overbearing mother gives those difficulties a specific shape. His inability to distance himself from her makes parental attachment an active presence in the marriage, rather than background information explaining a troubled man. Batra’s relationship drama is strongest when the physical encounters and this family conflict remain connected. Each return places her beside a husband whose attachment to his mother still occupies space between them.
Lust Stories 3 premiered on Netflix on September 18, 2026. The anthology film brings together four distinct filmmakers to explore modern relationships, intimacy, and the unspoken complexities of human desire.
Where to Watch Lust Stories 3 (2026) Online
Full Credits
Title: Lust Stories 3
Distributor: Netflix
Release date: September 18, 2026
Rating: 18+
Running time: 2 hours 45 minutes (165 minutes)
Director: Vikramaditya Motwane, Kiran Rao, Shakun Batra, Vishal Bhardwaj
Writers: Kiran Rao, Tanaji Dasgupta, Avinash Sampath, Sumukhi Suresh, Shakun Batra, Sameeha Sabnis, Ashwathi Namboodiri, Nitesh Bhatia, Utkarshini Vashishtha, Vishal Bhardwaj
Producers and Executive Producers: Ronnie Screwvala, Ashi Dua
Cast: Radhika Apte, Konkona Sen Sharma, Vijay Varma, Abhishek Banerjee, Gurfateh Pirzada, Sana Thampi, Ali Fazal, Radhika Madan, Aditi Rao Hydari, Siddharth
- Composer: Vishal Bhardwaj, Ram Sampath, Sneha Khanwalkar, Yash Sahai
The Review
Lust Stories 3
Lust Stories 3 is strongest when desire finds expression through culturally specific forms: Saira’s erotic writing, a television-inspired marital experiment, or intimacy strained by family obligations. Hydari’s playful vulnerability and Batra’s attention to unresolved attachment give the anthology lasting emotional interest. Rao’s crime-and-twins plot is entertaining, but its reversals leave less room to understand the attraction driving it.
PROS
- Erotic literature, local language, and film parody enrich Bhardwaj’s segment.
- Hydari balances sensuality, mischief, and uncertainty.
- Apte’s nervous laughter makes marital experimentation feel vulnerable.
- Batra grounds relationship conflict in specific family attachments.
CONS
- Rao’s accumulating twists crowd the exploration of desire.
- One By Two develops its criminal complications faster than its characters’ wants.
