Bollywood is no match for India’s new wave cinema

The signature motif of “Kantara: A Legend — Chapter 1,” India’s second-biggest box-office success of 2025, is a primordial scream. It may as well be the sound of old Bollywood in its death throes, or the birth pangs of a new industry. “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 The overall experience is a bit like “The Northman,” except that the Viking legends have been replaced by homegrown deities and an animistic tradition of spirit worship that has spawned an art form.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 in 2024 of “Pushpa 2: The Rule,” a violent, stylised 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.

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, starring Vishal Jethwa and Ishaan Khatter. 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.