The 10 Best Hindi Performances of 2025, Ranked

Politely put, it’s been a noisy year for Hindi cinema. And I’m not even talking about the fun soundtracks. It’s slim pickings (most Bollywood year-enders begin like this) in terms of artistic merit, if not box-office glow. But merge it with the streaming calendar, and there’s been no dearth of fine acting. It’s a season of stacked ensembles — where everyone is so good that nobody is better — and gritty indie releases. The range of performances across mediums is always a silver lining, even when the titles themselves stumble in pursuit of popular validation. But for every divisive and button-pushing hit, there’s a Superboys of Malegaon, a Gustaakh Ishq, a The Great Shamsuddin Family and a Homebound to normalise the margins. They may not have set the cash registers ringing, but they have the sort of archival value that manufactured blockbusters can only dream of.

Regardless of templates, who can deny us the diversity of characters? Primary, secondary, third wheels. A dying friend who gets to fly in a film within a film. A guilt-riddled husband playing the fool in Goa to win back his angry wife. A contract killer who works for the honour of his upper-caste peers. A sheltered girl who hears on a phone-call that her homebound soulmate is dead. A Delhi cop, numbed by grief, waiting for the coffin of his Muslim protege. A pragmatic inspector resisting marriage because the kundlis don’t match. An Alzheimer's-afflicted lover leaving to protect her rockstar boyfriend. A swaggy Pakistani gangster whose ego prevents him from detecting a spy in their midst. A woman constable possessed by the trauma of having a drug-addicted son. An orchard-owning patriarch soaring off a mountain ramp with mechanical wings. Say what you will about Bollywood’s funk, it’s been a buffet of humans on screen — the faces are doing what the narratives cannot. On that note, here are 10 of my favourite Hindi-language performances in 2025, across films and shows, ranked in ascending order:

10) Girija Oak (Perfect Family)

Girija Oak in 'Perfect Family'

In Perfect Family, a child’s emotional crisis sends her dysfunctional adult family to therapy. There are five members, but one of them is cursed with the multitudes of modern womanhood. Girija Oak’s Neeti is the overattentive mom, frustrated wife, bitter daughter-in-law, resentful daughter and overqualified homemaker. All of her identities are forced to co-exist in a Punjabi household of skewed gender dynamics. The actor plays an angry character who is seldom reduced to her ‘theatricality’; there’s a history of sacrifice and unreciprocated promises in every argument she makes, every accusation she absorbs and every tear she sheds. There’s also a sense of continuity between each of her selves; you can tell that Neeti’s mood merely transitions from one space to the next. She misses the person she was, the marriage she had and the future she dreamed of. Yet she is stuck by choice rather than duty: a rare glimpse of surrogate agency in which the person reverse-engineers her feelings to justify her compromise. Oak is especially intense as the partner of a man who thinks he’s the tortured protagonist of his own story. A marital showdown — in which she spits truths with venom and verve — yanks the minor-key series out of its conflict-resolution aesthetic. It almost unfolds as a punchline to Oak’s recent fame as “national crush” in a male-dominated country.

9) Abhishek Banerjee (Stolen)

An arrogant urban guy who ‘learns a lesson’ in a hostile hinterland is Hindi cinema’s version of the eat-the-rich trope. Abhishek Banerjee is this guy in Stolen, an NH 10-coded survival thriller that smartly milks its own blind spots. His character wants nothing to do with the central premise of a tribal woman who’s lost her baby, but he is quickly sucked into a vortex of prejudice and violence; his armchair privilege is beaten into submission by the time the film ends. Banerjee doesn’t milk the stereotype. He echoes the man’s loss of control and dignity in the most primal ways, almost as if he’s compensating for the camera choosing to follow him instead of the woman whose tragedy it is. It’s a skilled performance, mainly because of how the actor invokes the culpability of his character through the lens of a genre that often glorifies such trial-by-fire journeys. He remains flawed even after he’s battered and enlightened: a tightrope walk that allows the film to be more confessional than others of its ilk. He’s also responsible for one of the great almost-deaths of the year. A scene where a mob tears into him has many social implications, but Banerjee somehow makes us root for neither side in a nation that flaunts its blood instead of treating it.

8) Priyanka Bose (Agra)

A still from 'Agra'

Kanu Behl’s Agra is a difficult and occasionally gentle exploration of the politics of lust in small-town India. Its protagonist is male, lonely, frustrated, self-destructive, and pursues sex as a medicine to cure his repression. He achieves his carnal awakening through a tryst with a polio-afflicted widow named Priti. A formidable Priyanka Bose plays Priti as far more than an enigma and a device in someone else’s story. From the way she looks at him, speaks to him and straddles him in bed, you can tell that she is the driver of her own fate; she sees him as a way out, like he sees her as a way in. During their frantic sexual encounters, her body seems to provide answers to questions he isn’t even asking. It’s a performance full of moral ambiguity and thin lines, one that seldom boxes womanhood into a cage of easy binaries. She is both kind and manipulative, selfish and sincere, lover and loather, outcast and mole, homewrecker and partner. The suspense isn’t in the fact that Priti keeps us guessing; it’s in how she infiltrates her way into a setting that stigmatises ‘complicated’ women like her.

7) Ahaan Panday and Aneet Padda (Saiyaara)

Given that our love for this love story transcends logic, it’s only fair that the inclusion of both actors as ‘one performance’ defies the rules of such lists. It’s also an appropriately romantic touch — one cannot exist without the other, just as joy cannot exist without sadness, just as art cannot exist without desire and propaganda cannot exist without craft. You could argue that Aneet Padda is technically sharper or that Ahaan Panday is sprinkled with shinier stardust, but seeing them in isolation defeats the point of Saiyaara — a duet resisting the destiny of a solo career. Krish Kapoor and Vaani Batra became the phenomenon of the summer, pitting the microaggressions of modern attachment against the musicality of vintage feelings. It’s almost like they’re daring to be sappy in an age of keypad gratifications. The story of a trendy couple torn between heart and mind — between falling and forgetting — is familiar, but the chemistry between the leads is replete with newness and discovery. The arc of a troubled rockstar softened by the threat of anonymity is personalised, but conventions aside, it’s been a while since a mainstream pair urged viewers to be swept away on vibes alone. I’m almost 40, but being a Saiyaara-head is now a core memory.

6) Siddhant Chaturvedi (Dhadak 2)

A still from 'Dhadak 2'

Shazia Iqbal’s brave adaptation of Pariyerum Perumal has generated much discourse — from the calibrated caste dynamics, the film’s title and cultural translation to the censor struggles, altered climax and an agency-forward female protagonist. In the process, Siddhant Chaturvedi’s performance as a Dalit law student activated by love might have gone under the radar. When his character, Neelesh, falls for upper-caste girl Vidhi, he behaves like the hero of a mainstream romance: apolitical, musical, dreamy, delirious, equal. But the film keeps puncturing his delusions every time he threatens to take off. He remains in denial, head down, the outcast who aims to mind his own business and offend noone — until he realises that silence is his burden, not his privilege. Chaturvedi’s return to form supplies the character’s awakening; his activism becomes a consequence of the humiliation he suffers for daring to feel. There’s an expression that stays with me: Neelesh sympathetically cups Vidhi’s face when they’re exchanging stories of trauma. She speaks of her mother’s death, almost to ‘compete’ with his sadness, but he is genuinely moved — his reaction is anything but patronising, as if he’s just learned that first-world problems are problems too.

5) Zahan Kapoor (Black Warrant)

I can’t think of an uncannier casting choice this year than Zahan Kapoor — he of the diminutive frame, blue-blooded heritage and movie-star face — playing the role of a fresh-faced Tihar jailer in a 1980s anti-narrative. His real-life character, Sunil Gupta, is fraught with a crisis of Indian masculinity; he is short, soft, unassuming and sensitive in a hostile environment that’s designed to swallow him whole. The image is supplied by Kapoor’s unconventional presence as an artiste in the illustrious Kapoor family. At first, he plays Sunil as someone willing to be molded by the setting and faking authority to fit in; criminals prey on his insecurities and empathy, as do rugged colleagues and bosses. But as the series progresses, it’s Sunil who ends up influencing the job — like the beta-hero of a workspace drama unburdened by the limits of non-fiction. The performer and jailer become indistinguishable from each other, injecting the episodic series with character-based stakes. It’s as much a microcosm of India as a portrait of a dysfunctional ‘family’ in an India that’s wired to neglect its margins. Kapoor’s perceived weakness — like Alia Bhatt’s in Gangubai Kathiawadi — becomes Black Warrant’s bodily strength.

4) Radhika Apte (Sister Midnight)

Radhika Apte in 'Sister Midnight'

What’s an acting list without Radhika Apte? In perhaps the most unhinged and genre-fluid Indian film of the year, Apte delivers a wry and delightfully loose-tongued performance as a woman who satirises the perils of arranged marriage. It’s as if she’s Frankenstein’s Monster and feminist warrior at once, without trivializing either of the tones. As a viewer, one isn’t sure whether to laugh, gasp or gag in horror at her deadpan antics as a famished fable-like figure stalking the night streets of Mumbai. Is she crazy, cannibalistic, eccentric, attention-seeking or just…normal? And that’s the essence of any great turn: it escapes labels and lets the audience live in the unpredictability of a moment, from one scene to another, regardless of how the dots join. The movie itself goes with her flow, tethering the character’s occupation of spaces and spirals with Apte’s scenery-chewing talent. The wild and provocative filmmaking keeps up with her feral ways. After a point, it becomes about the wife’s descent into freedom as well as her shapeless audacity; what doesn’t kill her only makes her stronger — and stranger. Against all the odds, she conveys a linearity of longing.

3) Ishaan Khatter (Homebound)

Ishaan Khatter’s performance in Neeraj Ghaywan’s drama stands testament to the fact that emotional integrity — not cultural authenticity, not historical accuracy, not even body language — is the key to a film’s relationship with an actor. His depiction of a marginalised young man defined by designations — best friend, Muslim dreamer, son, migrant, aspirant, lockdown struggler, griever — cements the film’s pro-humanity approach in a politically charged setting. It becomes about right and wrong, not left and right, thanks to Khatter’s intuitive embrace of a character who is never reduced to any single trajectory. He is at once an unwitting protagonist of several real-time tragedies, but not once does the toll of existing in a fractured India hijack the covert hope of his journey. There’s a truth to him that allows Homebound to expand the boundaries of adaptation and commentary; every conflict is inherent, not earned or accumulated. Men like Khatter’s Mohammed Shoaib Ali will continue to live as an act of resistance and resist as an act of living. In keeping with the film’s Oscar ambitions, it’s fair to say that there is simply no other choice for him; it’s one battle after another.

2) Jaideep Ahlawat (Paatal Lok 2)

Jaideep Ahlawat in 'Paatal Lok 2'

The remarkable aspect of Ahlawat’s performance as journeyman cop Hathiram Chaudhary is that, across two seasons, the man is humbled by his own moral spine. Being an unlikely hero or a pawn burdened by one’s own conscience is one thing, but Ahlawat plays him as someone who isn’t supposed to be so human. The character has all the traits of a corrupt-inspector stereotype: sloppy, foul-mouthed, unfit, Haryanvi, cynical, even patriarchal. But he knows better. He keeps defying the odds — and his own physicality — to do his job in a system rigged against him; he could be a journalist in a post-truth media landscape, but his untucked uniform searches for his frame. While stumbling through the North-East in Season 2, Ahlawat’s Hathiram is confronted with all the ammo to sell out. It’s easier. But that one scene in the car with former-subordinate-turned-superior Imran Ansari encapsulates the poignant dissonance of the character. Hathiram has discovered that Ansari is gay, there is tension, Ansari expects hostility, and yet in that single moment, the Jatt slob defies decades of regressive conditioning to deliver the most tender ‘advice’ possible. He reacts more like a father who’s disappointed in the fact that he wasn’t trusted enough (reminiscent of Patrick’s coming-out scene in Schitt’s Creek). Never before has the sentiment “follow your heart” felt so valid. Never has the finality of a bond been this disarming.

1) Monika Panwar (Khauf)

It’s only fitting that the best Hindi series of the year features the most impressive performance of the year. Khauf stars Monika Panwar as a real-world protagonist stranded between identities: the natural and the supernatural, trauma and truth, succumber and survivor. Panwar’s Madhu is a small-town striver who moves into a spooky ladies’ hostel in big bad Delhi, haunted by the scars of sexual abuse and makeshift agency. But the actual horror isn’t the paranormal happenings of her room where a previous occupant once lived; it’s the everyday male gaze, the dark subways, the lecherous bus rides, the late-night walks to the hostel, the suspicion towards a woke man who resembles her abuser, a boyfriend who may or may not have ulterior motives. Panwar is devastatingly present as the fragile and oddly resilient girl in a moody narrative that argues how even the genre of afterlife-revenge stories is no longer the domain of the oppressed. You can tell she’s been through a lot. You assume she is possessed by the spirit of a wronged victim looking for justice, but her body becomes an unconsenting medium for the monster instead. Panwar nails Madhu’s battlefield-like aura, where her womanhood battles an invasive masculine ghost. Her turn is complex, chilling and humane despite the plurality of the premise. She is both the hunted and the hunter, bleeding into the screen even when she can’t be seen.

Special Mentions:

Shalini Vatsa (Khauf, Homebound)

Vatsa’s Chhaya Kadam-level year has resulted in two outstanding peripheral performances — as a gruff-but-maternal warden in Khauf, and a marginalised villager in Homebound whose main caste is motherhood.

Sanjay Kumar Sahu (Black, White & Grey — Love Kills)

The reason the viewer stays in the dark about the format of this ingeniously mounted show — a “fictional mockumentary” where everything, including reality, is staged — is because of Sanjay Kumar Sahu’s eerily clever performance as a suspect in a piece-to-camera interview. I dare you to tell the difference.

Sunny Hinduja (Saare Jahan Se Accha)

Playing an ISI chief in an Indian espionage thriller isn't exactly a playground of possibility, but Hinduja sinks his teeth into the role of an edgy Pakistani patriot in a cat-and-mouse chase with his own ideology. It's an enjoyable turn in a merciful-but-uneven spy series.

Farida Jalal (The Great Shamsuddin Family)

It’s hard to single out a performance in an ensemble, but watching Farida Jalal seamlessly weave between conversations, provocations and moods like a judgey matriarch in a chamber drama is balm for the bruised Bollywood soul.

Roshan Mathew (Kankhajura)

As a mentally unstable ex-con desperate for the validation of his older brother, Mathew thrives on a heady fusion of innocence, shrewdness and no-rules acting. The show is middling at best, but Mathew humanises the sociopath without exaggerating his tics.

Shashank Arora (Superboys of Malegaon)

As a dying dreamer in a gang of clashing voices, Arora wears the silence of someone whose unconditional love unlocks the distance of male friendships.