The Best Performances on Hindi Streaming in 2025 (So Far)

Only six months in, it’s rare that the Hindi streaming space is already brimming with end-of-the-year contenders.

Bleak as it has been for mainstream Bollywood, the most fertile storytelling continues to happen in the long format. It’s a silver-screen lining, pun intended. It’s also a good time to list some of the most striking performances in the medium so far. Much has been written about — including in an early issue of this column — Jaideep Ahlawat in Paatal Lok 2 (Prime Video) and Zahan Kapoor in Black Warrant (Netflix). The police officers they play belong to opposite ends of the Indian masculinity and cultural spectrum, but they’re the easiest picks in this list.

So the idea here is to explore the other top-tier OTT turns this year. Starting with Monika Panwar’s exceptionally committed role as the ‘haunted’ protagonist of Khauf. Panwar has been doing ambitious work since her breakout in Jamtara, so to see her lead a show that challenges our perception of horror-acting is quite the feat. Her body language in the acclaimed Prime series not only captures the essence of a small-town outsider trapped in a big-city trauma tale, it also makes the genre — and its metaphysical fears — more accessible.

Another title with a pitch-perfect cast is Black, White & Gray – Love Kills (Sony LIV). The inventive true-crime mockumentary stars Kota Factory’s Ritvik Sahore as an alleged serial killer on the run in a country stoking communal and post-truth tensions. Sahore is suitably urgent as the morally ambivalent lead, but the actor playing the ‘actual’ version of this character in the staged interviews — Sanjay Kumar Sahu — is the one who steals the show. It’s a great example of how inactivity can be as expressive as emotional volume. Sahu embodies the unglamorous reality of the loftily imagined suspect; he does an uncanny rendition of all the controversial talking heads we’ve seen in investigative docu-dramas over the years. His relationship with the camera — and his deadpan answers to the maker’s loaded questions — is more suspenseful than the recreated parts of his story.

In the hit-and-miss thriller Kankhajura (Sony LIV), Roshan Mathew rises above the middling-remake syndrome to play a sociopath who’s pronounced and vulnerable at once. Mathew sinks his teeth into the role of a mentally unstable man who quietly wreaks havoc in his brother’s life after being released from a prison in Goa. He seems to enjoy the gimmick of a performance within a performance, constantly blurring the line between actor and character. It’s the sort of chameleon-like turn that Vijay Varma usually excels at, except he manages to be both villain and underdog. One empathises with his ‘innocence’ by virtue of him fighting conventional baddies: builders, politicians, bullies, land sharks. But Mathew never lets us forget that the protagonist, too, is anything but a hero.

In Criminal Justice: A Family Matter (JioHostar) — the fourth season of the popular legal drama Criminal Justice — Surveen Chawla makes an impact as the separated wife of a surgeon arrested for the death of his girlfriend. While Pankaj Tripathi continues to be the recurring protagonist as the middle-class lawyer, Chawla’s role as both mother and ex-partner is key to an over-twisty crime story posing as a dysfunctional family thriller. She flits between being mysterious and transparent with ease, staying emotionally busy in every frame and invoking the primal instincts of Sushmita Sen’s character from Aarya. Chawla has slowly turned into an actor who’s so reliable that she blends in more than standing out.

In Dabba Cartel’s (Netflix) universe of subverted female empowerment, Jyotika’s performance as the only upscale and former-CEO-coded woman in the ‘tiffin-box cartel’ is one of the driving forces of the show. Her character, Varuna, quit her career and shrunk herself to assuage the ego of her insecure husband — she channels this resentment by joining a middle-class outfit that reverses gender norms in the male-dominated ‘profession’ of drug-peddling. She knows the morality is blurred, but it’s her only way of defying the patriarchy. Varuna’s marital showdown is a masterclass in acting and reacting: years of acrimony bubble to the top in a scene that stays with the viewer long after the show ends.

Rounding this up with another Jamtara alumnus, in Dupahiya (Prime), Sparsh Shrivastava nails the part of a rural Instagram influencer and Bollywood aspirant. He does so much with a still face and nervous energy that you almost wish Dupahiya was centred solely around him instead of the quirky crime-free village dealing with the theft of a bike. The Panchayat-coded series is elevated every time his character appears — a tonal extension of his underrated Laapataa Ladies performance. Like the others mentioned above, Shrivastava reveals how long-form acting is a different language altogether: one that thrives on the continuity of full sentences rather than the novelty of showy words.