Bollywood is no match for India's new wave cinema

New, multilingual movie offerings from southern India with fresh stories are making waves.

- Andy Mukherjee

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 The overall experience is a bit like The Northman, except that the Viking legends have been replaced by homegrown deities and an animistic tradition of spirit worship that has spawned an art form.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 colourful 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 was 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.