Buffet of 'Broken Men'

How summer releases of 2025 refashioned masculinity.

- By J Shruti

Confession: I love broken men. Sounds harsh? Masochistic? Cruel? Think of James Gunn's Superman (David Corenswet) this summer—he was thrashed across the ice in Norway in the opening scene, facing the first defeat of his short but glorious career. This superhero—invincible, a tad above us, cis and heterosexual— is punctured, vulnerable, and perhaps even shaken?

The suffering is not endearing, but the context is. It is a brutal reminder that the man, in fact, is not made of steel. Not a hardened shell, but a gaping wound. Unbearably tragic, yes, but more humanising than a facetious display of bravado.

These wounds can run a spotlight on the tragic systemic forces, like they do in Shazia Iqbal's Dhadak 2 for Neelesh (Siddhant Chaturvedi), a Dalit man whose life is marked by casteism, and is hunted by his potential girlfriend's upper-caste family, and in Ryan Coogler's Sinners, where this awareness of racial discrimination ends up informing the survival instincts and foresight of Smoke (Michael B Jordan), who is able to fend off vampires and the Ku Klux Klan. This woundedness in these films is not a narcissistic summon, as can so often be the case with stories of “tragic” men. Instead, it is a siren that helps them place the foulness of their situations.

Then there is the love story. Mohit Suri's