Outlook’s Picks: 6 Best Indian Indie Films Of 2025

In a year where yet again toxic love, jingoistic fervour and brute militarised macho superiority were enshrined in mainstream Indian cinema, independent outings breached the frontiers with ambition, daring and heart. 

Here are Outlook’s picks for the year’s most searing indies that travelled to the farther ends of imagination, interpretation and invitation. 

Rohan Kanawade’s Sundance winner holds arguably the year’s most piercing performance in Bhushaan Manoj. The actor essays the bereaved Anand, who returns to his ancestral village for his father’s funeral rites. Amidst death and mourning, hope, romance and possibility flower. Kanawade takes characters through an interface between grief and healing. Along with Suraaj Suman, Manoj summons a portrait of yearning and liberation. This is a film of exquisite tenderness, luminous grace and generosity, settling on our hearts with inexorable pull. 

Radhika Apte makes the wildest detours and leaps in the Karan Kandhari-directed black comedy perfectly plausible. Apte’s Uma chafes at her new identity post-marriage as a woman expected to serve her husband’s whims. Domesticity isn’t a fit for her own wanton needs and demands. Mumbai forms the stage to Uma’s increasingly bonkers journey of self-actualisation. Armed with an eclectic soundtrack and Sverre Sørdal’s richly eccentric images, Sister Midnight performs deadpan tonal swings with arresting confidence. Even if the film doesn’t wholly cohere, its blazing gutsiness and visual ambition outranks anything else this year. 

Bhargav Saikia’s Sikkim-set horror has such epic ambition and scale in its imagination that it’s hard not to cheer for it. There’s a primeval dimension to this bent of ecological horror Saikia drums up. Bokshi might seem too long and stretched in parts, but it unfolds with verve and conviction, a pleasing impulse towards always widening its scope and not curtailing how far its origin myth can extend and disrupt. It builds to a wildly spectacular climax of eruption.

Natesh Hegde’s sophomore, Vagachipani, proves his debut, Pedro (2021), was no fluke. With an evocative atmosphere and Vikas Urs’ steady, observant lensing, a sense of slowly uncoiling tension combines an allusive commentary on feudal politics and power hierarchies. Hegde luxuriates in the tentative lead-up to a spurt of irreversible, inevitable violence. This is richly ambient cinema, alive with subtle, brooding mystery. The environment in which the muted drama plays out is as vital a player. 

Aranya Sahay’s debut is that rare wonder: a brilliant idea mutated into a heartfelt, inspired and profound film. It’s an incredible marriage of ideas and concerns around the natural world, the animals we co-habit the planet with, single motherhood, Adivasi representation and artificial intelligence. Working as a data labeller at a tech centre, Nehma (Sonal Madhushankar) has a fraught relationship with her daughter but the quietly hopeful, resilient film allows growth and autonomy for both. It's an empathetic expansion of the world beyond corporate delineations and vested interests, admirably sitting alongside its characters without judgement or a skewed gaze. What emerges is a deeply empowering reflection on a balance between the ancient, the rooted and the future. 

Nidhi Saxena’s second feature owes a lyrical lineage to her under-seen debut, Sad Letters Of An Imaginary Woman (2024). As the wife of an absent soldier, Trimala Adhikari captures a depth of pining, resignation and dilemma when a mysterious stranger (Adil Hussain) walks in. Boundaries set upon female desire, binding morality, exemplified by speaking shoes, run against a snake legend, rife with its own temptation and the forbidden. The individual emotional crisis gradually wends into a collective reckoning of women with everything that’s been proscribed.