Lust Stories 3: Review

Lust Stories 3

Anthology films are a gamble by design, four directors, four sensibilities, one shared premise, and no guarantee any two will land the same way. Lust Stories 3, now streaming on Netflix, proves the point again. It opens strong, wanders in the middle, and closes on a note that almost redeems the detour. Almost.

Vikramaditya Motwane’s segment carries the film’s best instincts. Konkona Sensharma and Radhika Apte play two friends whose marriages have gone quietly stale, and their solution – swapping husbands, played by Abhishek Banerjee and Vijay Varma, for a weekend getaway. It should read as farce on paper. It doesn’t. Motwane lets the comedy sit alongside something more uncomfortable: the specific exhaustion of long marriages, the kind that doesn’t announce itself with a fight but with silence over breakfast. Sensharma and Apte, both far too skilled to play this broadly, keep the segment tethered to something real even as the plot invites chaos. It’s the strongest fifteen minutes in the anthology, and it sets an expectation the rest of the film struggles to meet.

Kiran Rao’s story, following a pizza delivery worker and a nail artist in Mumbai, wants to make an argument about desire, that it isn’t only physical, that it’s tangled up with what people want their lives to become. It’s a good argument. It’s also one the segment states more than it dramatizes. Gurfateh Pirzada and Sana Thampi are likeable, and there are individual scenes, a shared meal, a moment of unexpected tenderness, where the idea breathes. But too often the segment tells you what it’s exploring instead of trusting you to notice, and a runtime this short can’t afford that kind of explaining.

Shakun Batra’s contribution, with Ali Fazal and Radhika Madan as a couple whose relationship has already failed in every way but the paperwork, is the one that will divide viewers most. It’s interested in lust as anaesthetic, as the thing people reach for when a wound is too raw to look at directly, and there’s a version of this segment that’s genuinely devastating. This isn’t quite that version. It circles its own thesis without ever tightening around it, and by the time it ends, the ache it’s going for feels more asserted than earned.

Then Vishal Bhardwaj closes the anthology in 1980s Hyderabad, and the film remembers what it’s capable of. Aditi Rao Hydari plays a literature teacher whose marriage has room for affection but none for imagination, and she is, simply, terrific, sensuous in one breath and quietly funny in the next, never letting the character curdle into either a victim or a punchline. Siddharth matches her register scene for scene. Bhardwaj understands that period detail isn’t just production design; it’s a way of making repression visible without saying the word out loud, and the segment uses its setting to say things the film’s contemporary stories only gesture at.

Taken together, Lust Stories 3 is the anthology problem in miniature: a genuinely good opening, a genuinely good closing, and a middle that feels like it’s waiting for its own runtime to end. Anthologies live and die by their weakest link, and this one has two. Watch it for Motwane and Bhardwaj bookending things, and don’t expect the middle to hold up its end of the bargain.

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