They don’t make classic love stories anymore. But that may be because it’s no longer limited to conventional romance. It’s more or less everywhere: in social dramas, coming-of-age tales, platonic friendship comedies, humanist actioners, even war spectacles. And when you see it, you can’t unsee it. Here are five modern Indian movies that prove that.
All We Imagine as Light (2024)
Payal Kapadia’s ethereal film about two Malayali nurses in Mumbai features a couple of love stories. The older nurse, Prabha (Kani Kusruti), yearns for a husband she’s barely met. The younger one, Anu (Divya Prabha), is in a secret relationship with a Muslim boy. But the real romance is between the film and the metropolis of Mumbai — the film is designed to deconstruct the illusions of a city built on the debris of immigrant dreams. You could say this isn’t a love letter. Except it is, only an honest and brutal one: in all its little resentments and bitter truths, in all its uncomfortable ruses and resignations.
Gully Boy (2019)
In Zoya Akhtar’s film, the mercurial bond between childhood sweethearts Murad (Ranveer Singh) and Safeena (Alia Bhatt) is only a grounding point. The film features their relationship, friendships, a mentor-protégé tale, father-son conflict, dysfunctional family drama, interclass trysts and more. But so much is rooted in the love story between a talented slum-dwelling rapper and his India-sized dreams, often slotted under the umbrella of “coming-of-age” or “underdog” arcs. This is all-consuming and he refuses to let it become a star-crossed tragedy. Not wanting to end up as a victim of circumstances has never been so romantic.
Ikkis (2026)
Arguably Sriram Raghavan’s finest film, Ikkis — on paper — appears to be a biographical drama of 21-year-old Indian war hero and Param Vir Chakra awardee Arun Khetarpal. But the ‘suspense’ here is what the film does with the posthumous love story between a man and the country he gave his life for. Khetarpal’s conventional hero narrative in 1971 is intercut with his old father’s visit to Pakistan — and the place his son died at — 30 years later. Given the volume of this genre, Ikkis’ biggest twist is that it wonders about the freedom that wars are fought for. Who knew a war drama could unfold in the language of a wistful love story?
Haseen Dillruba (2021)
The all-out campiness of Haseen Dillruba, starring Taapsee Pannu and Vikrant Massey, supplies the core theme of the film: a reckless and sensual love is summoned out of the nice-guy hero. Massey plays him like a human slowly mutating into an unhinged beast — a balance between two contrasting brands of Bollywood masculinity. The Vinil Mathew film believes that love is useless if it’s not a little toxic, and does an uncanny job of selling this idea. Essentially a romantic thriller that refuses to reduce companionship to a safe vessel of belonging and refuses to reduce the love story to a genre of aspiration and middle-class longing.
Sir (2018)
Rohena Gera’s Sir takes up the complex task of humanising a love story between a housemaid and her male employer — without fetishising or judging it, while also acknowledging the unsurmountable social barriers and tricky power dynamics at play. It features a top performance by Tillotama Shome, but one of the great things about the film is its emotional maturity. The conflict is already baked into the setting, so it doesn’t go overboard to amplify the differences between the two characters. The gaze is less societal and more curious, as if the story itself is trying to figure out if there’s a right way to go about emotions like love in such a context.