The 10 Best Hindi Performances of 2024, Ranked

Modern Hindi cinema has had its share of ups, downs and more downs, but there has rarely been a bad year for performances. If there's one department that isn't hard to compile a year-ending list for, it's the craft of acting. Thanks to the advent of streaming and the casting revolution, there's no longer a dearth or an underutilisation of talent. The Hindi space has been blessed with a wider diversity of acting, but it's only now that the democratisation of genres is evident. An action-hero or superstar performance is afforded the same scrutiny and scale as a “serious” long-form or muted turn. Different skill-sets and ranges are allowed to find different brands of appreciation.

2024 is another brick in this wall. More often than not, the actors have been stronger than the movies and shows they've featured in. But the best examples have been the ones that are inextricable from the stories they define. From a dying dad who doesn't die and the sexual awakening of a teenage student to the trials of a Somalian-Indian hustler, a flesh-eating Noida psychopath and a protective sister, the year has been a cultural buffet of Indian notions, motions and emotions. 

On that note, here's a list of my ten favourite performances across mediums: feature-length movies and shows, streaming and theatrical. It's never easy, it's always controversial, it can get violent (especially if there are two number ones!), but I can't think of a better catalyst of debate:

10. Abhishek Bachchan (I Want to Talk)

Bachchan’s second innings has been punctuated by high-pitched human-condition roles: Breathe: Into the Shadows (dissociative identity disorder), Bob Biswas (middle-class hitman), Ghoomer (abusive cricket coach). You can tell he’s been trying — too hard. So it’s sort of poetic that his most striking performance emerges from a story that requires his cancer-afflicted character to normalise the effort to live; he plays a man shorn of the very embellishments of trying. Shoojit Sircar’s anti-drama harnesses Abhishek Bachchan’s burdened voice and awkward physicality in unprecedented ways. As someone who goes through multiple surgeries without much fuss — as a distant dad whose low-key courage is revealed to his daughter rather than advertised to her — Bachchan moves like a human at odds with his makeshift body and beating heart. He looks like he’s constantly renegotiating his relationship with who — and what — he becomes. He personifies a rare Hindi film that thrives on the stillness of suffering, not the volume of pain. At some point, you stop recognising the surname and start seeing the embattled reconstruction of an identity.  

9. Konkona Sen Sharma (Killer Soup)

Abhishek Chaubey’s Macbethian broth is an acquired taste — a morbid portrait of chaos, cheating, familyhood, patriarchy, revenge and above all, mediocrity. A fictional Tamil Nadu hill station crackles with excessive plotting, magic realism (and mushrooms), and memorable characters. The cast transcends the choppy narrative, and it’s the inevitable Konkona Sen Sharma who slays as Swathi Shetty, a terrible home chef who bumps off her abusive husband and passes off his subservient doppelganger — who is also her lover — as the husband. Sen Sharma’s intuitive performance turns Swathi into more than just a ‘desperate housewife’. At some point, it feels like the story starts to mock and conspire against her, denying her the slick agency of a woman turning the tables on a sexist environment. She makes for an oddly heartbreaking victim of her own desires — a feminist tragedy that’s reduced to the constraints of her gender and social stature. No matter how hard she tries, she cannot escape her identity as the “better half” of a doomed love story. Sen Sharma’s turn isn’t as crowd-pleasing, feeding Swathi’s hidden audacity to humble — rather than escape — a culture that’s rigged against her. Even as she’s pulling the strings, the puppet is often revealed to be her; she is consigned to the fate of being an incompetent villain and a toxic lover. I can’t think of any other actor whose shapeless presence alone rewrites the subtext that the film-making struggles to convey. 

8. Vivek Gomber (Lootere)

Vivek Gomber has had a very Sohum-Shah-like career, in that he’s an independent producer who also happens to be a decent actor. His campier roles are an acquired taste (the colonial accent of A Suitable Boy; the Singaporean diction in Jigra), but he locates the right balance of camp and hyperactive Indianism in Lootere, Jay Mehta’s ambitious ship-hijack series. As the shady Somalia-based Indian businessman Vikrant Gandhi, Gomber is a human tension ball. Vikrant’s consignment plays a key role in the plot, and Gomber’s Harshad-Mehta-wired arc is all hailstorm and fire: chain-smoking, cussing, reptilian, and triggered by the hostility he faces as the “outsider” in a corrupt system. It’s an adrenaline-fuelled action-villain performance; Vikrant behaves like an impressionable man who’s struggling to escape his own fondness for gangster movies. Everything about him feels inspired, not least Gomber’s terrific transition from mentality monster to morality monster. He bleeds into the sepia-tinged setting, a chaotic ‘family man’ mutating into a sweaty tragicomedy.

7. Mukul Chadda (Fairy Folk)

Mukul Chadda has been around for a while; he channels a career’s worth of hunger and anxiety into a role that blurs the boundaries between real and reel, in a film that blurs the lines between truth and fantasy. Karan Gour’s Fairy Folk is a daringly meta marital drama disguised as a quirky sci-fi indie. It stars real-life couple Chadda and Rasika Dugal as Mohit and Ritika, a jaded Mumbai couple who find a genderless fairy that morphs into a manifestation of their repressed desires. It looks better than it sounds. While Ritika receives a younger ‘husband,’ Mohit gets the short end of the straw when his version of Ritika emerges in the form of Hansa, a woman in a man’s body. Chadda plays it so straight that plausibility is never a problem — you can tell that Mohit’s good-guy image is infected with a crumbling sense of masculinity and guilt. He’s not as successful as his wife; he thinks he’s the bigger person; he puts physical attraction over emotional fertility; his mind is always racing; he assumes this experiment will benefit the marriage. It’s a complicated and self-aware performance, one that openly mines the insecurities of the human within the actor and the partner within the man.

6. Gyanendra Tripathi (Barah by Barah)

Gaurav Madan’s Barah by Barah — suitably shot on 16mm film — pits the fading celluloid of tradition against the digital transience of living. It tells the story of Sooraj, a death photographer struggling to keep his profession alive in modern-day Varanasi. Tripathi’s performance as Sooraj — a name that translates to “sun” — is racked with darkness, self-doubt and repressed individualism. He plays a tricky protagonist, one who isn’t sure about the nature of his own despair. Sooraj is stranded by the inert austerity of his father, an old man whose presence is holding his adult son back from entering a future. Yet he is also propelled by his wife and sister, characters who are too busy evolving with the times to fret about the gentrification of a holy city. He drinks and smokes like a person grieving his inability to move on. Tripathi’s Sooraj unfolds like a composition of two Indias, neither of which is a fully realised picture. He’s looked for business in death for so long that only now is he rediscovering the art of surviving. Tripathi has been a supporting actor for so long that he reframes Sooraj as someone who is learning to be the protagonist of his own picture.

5. Anjali Anand (Raat Jawaan Hai)

The finest Hindi series of the year, Sumeet Vyas’ friendship-meets-parenthood drama transcends easy labels like “breezy” and “feel-good”. Watching three childhood friends bound by their differences and challenged by the pressure of syncing lives is like watching Dil Chahta Hai reluctantly grow up. Anjali Anand’s performance as the ‘loud’ one is the Bombay-studded heart of the show. Her Radhika is an unpretentious and emotionally intelligent woman who — despite circumstances that reduce her to a type — seldom makes it seem like she’s shackled by motherhood. She is prone to bullying her friends and husband, but she’s also the sort of person whose go-for-broke theatricality and frankness seduces her people into craving her attention. When she’s with them, she makes them feel like nobody else exists. Anand nails that balance between toxic and tender. There’s a sense of ownership about a character that’s often restricted to the sidelines of slice-of-life stories. There are times when Radhika realises how difficult and insensitive she can be. But instead of flaunting her flaws or forcing them to fit the unapologetic contours of feminism, she sounds conflicted — and human — in a way that suggests her personality is a subconscious reaction to gender prejudice. Not to mention the moment she expresses her admiration for a friend with male-marked eloquence: “Tu Suman hai, bh*nch*d”. 

4. Diljit Dosanjh (Amar Singh Chamkila)
 

The Punjabi superstar-actor-singer is everywhere today, yet it’s his lyrical nowhere-ness as slain musician Amar Singh Chamkila that grounds Imtiaz Ali’s genre-defying biopic. Dosanjh plays a man whose provocative legacy is shaped by his social standing — a real-world Rockstar shackled by the hypocrisies of his setting. As a lower-caste artist who observes to create, he interprets the joy of being heard as the privilege of feeling seen. At times, the quizzical look on his face emerges from a sense of deep-rooted servitude; he strives to ‘cater’ to his fans, but he actually wants to belong and be accepted. It’s an intuitive and non-linear performance in a daring and non-linear film. The film’s best scenes feature Dosanjh’s Chamkila shifting from story to storyteller — especially the twilight-tinged moments in which he’s humming to himself, playing with words and sounds, oblivious to a world that’s primed to shoot the messenger. Dosanjh’s talent is most visible on stage: his character is so consumed by the act of making music for others that he almost pushes the film into making music for him.

3. Alia Bhatt (Jigra)

Out beyond the ideas of nepotism, toxic fandoms and controversial film discourse, there is a field. Alia Bhatt often meets us there. In the Gumrah-inspired Jigra, Bhatt silently reframes the relationship between Bollywood heroism, masculinity and morality. She plays Satya (“truth”), a seemingly regular woman who stops at nothing to free her younger brother from prison in a Singapore-coded country. Satya’s oversized shirts, diminutive stature and soft face subvert the little-girl-in-a-big-bad-world template. Bhatt performs Satya as a simmering protector who doesn’t have the time for narrative tropes, humanity, politics and attachments. She simply does what she needs to. The ‘numb’ face boils with anticipation of both triumph and tragedy. Her physicality is steeped in the kind of inertia that makes Satya’s strength look incidental; at no point does director Vasan Bala’s ode to the angry-young-man prototype distract from the primal desperation of an orphan. Bhatt’s act makes you relieved that the character’s restrained and no-nonsense rage is summoned for a personal rescue mission — and not something sinister. In a parallel universe, she would have easily been a deranged terrorist, an obsessive ex-partner or a vengeful serial killer.

2. Vikrant Massey (Sector 36)

Forget the Barjatya-coded irony of playing a man named Prem (“love”) who murders children, chops them into pieces, eats their flesh and has sex with the corpses of girls who reject him, Vikrant Massey somehow turns the concept of the ‘movie psychopath’ on its head. As the killer in Aditya Nimbalkar’s adaptation of the 2006 Noida serial murders, Massey becomes a cold-blooded embodiment of class rage. There is no hierarchy to his evil — he sees no distinction between homicide, pedophilia, cannibalism and rape — because he’s a monster created by social hierarchy. Prem is a lowly servant who relishes the scraps of his rich employer’s organ-trafficking crimes. Though Sector 36 is staged as an investigative thriller, Massey’s performance exposes the futility of systems, laws, and procedures. The reason the long interrogation scene works wonders is because he undoes the chase and delivers more of a casual statement than a confession. It’s not about Prem getting caught; it’s about him hoping to be noticed — seen — for imitating the audacity of those above him in the food chain. Prem associates power with money, but he soon discovers that power is violence without accountability. He thinks he’s doing his victims a favour by ‘rescuing’ them from a dark future, but the actor’s empty eyes reveal that his spirit, too, has long left his body. It’s uncanny that Massey’s hunger as an outsider in the film industry informs his edgier characters — both on and off screen.

1. Kani Kusruti (Girls Will Be Girls)

This is the Kani Kusruti era and we’re just living in it. Her smart supporting roles in the long format (Poacher, Killer Soup) are almost a footnote in a year where her film characters have transcended borders, cultures and mediums. Payal Kapadia’s Mumbai-coded masterpiece, All We Imagine As Light, is technically not a ‘Hindi’ film, so for the sake of year-end specifics, it’s Kusruti’s performance in India’s other festival darling — Shuchi Talati’s bilingual Girls Will Be Girls — that feels like a spiritual sibling. Kusruti’s Anila is an intrepid and tender portrait of a possessive mother at odds with her repressed womanhood. It’s an arc that threatens to become an identity — full of ache and incompleteness and lost time — but one that’s also an imposter in her teen daughter’s coming-of-age story. Kusruti has the ability to look like the camera is never on her. When Anila catches a glimpse of her daughter dancing, it brings to mind a similar moment from All We Imagine As Light, where the maternal nurse she plays watches her younger colleague jive to a Bollywood song. In both cases, Kusruti’s eyes convey a heady mix of envy and desire as she sees the other person be green and fluid the way she could never afford to. Yet, an umbilical cord of empathy keeps Anila from truly ‘competing’ with the girl she struggles to nurture. Anila seeks validation from her daughter’s boyfriend only for the girl to be jolted out of adolescence at the sight of the mother’s broken spirit. The actor’s face alone steers the film away from storytelling, towards the messy ambiguity of living.

1. Preeti Panigrahi (Girls Will Be Girls)

It’s only fitting that one best performance is incomplete without the other. In an acting debut for the ages, Preeti Panigrahi plays Mira, the curious 16-year-old head prefect of a Himalayan boarding school who obscures the lines between small-town adolescence and social rebellion. Mira’s sexual awakening is strained through the sieve of first love (with a smooth 17-year-old son of a diplomat) and domestic tension (with a needy mother vying for the boy’s attention). Panigrahi delivers a wonderfully open turn as a teenager who behaves like a literary character stuck in a real world. Mira’s girlhood is both familiar and distinct: the kiss-practice on her palms, the expanding expression of her body, the secret touches and grins, the ‘mature’ make-up sessions in front of the mirror, the googling of intimate positions, the act of sex as a barrage of questions and answers, the slight flaunting of her youth, and the loss of virginity unfolding like a distant memory. Mira grows up in a setting that blames female students for the length of their skirts rather than the perverts who take upskirt pictures, so she is conditioned to judge her mother for feeling seen rather than her boyfriend who pretends to look. Mira’s journey from being a product of patriarchy to a survivor of it is rooted in Panigrahi’s sure-footed rendition of a girl who discovers the transience of heartache.

Special Mentions:

Pratik Gandhi (Madgaon Express)

Gandhi has had a neat year as an on-screen husband (Do Aur Do Pyaar, Agni), but he brings the house down — while subverting impressions of a “comic turn” — as the meek Gujarati buddy whose inner beast is unleashed by cocaine.

Tahir Raj Bhasin (Yeh Kaali Kaali Ankhein 2)

Bhasin continues his restless, perceptive performance as an anxious antihero who thinks he’s an unlucky Bollywood hero in a setting full of villains.

Manoj Bajpayee (Despatch)

No list is complete without Bajpayee, who alters the grammar of the slain-journalist movie by playing a painfully flawed man at odds with the pressure of his heroism. 

Deepak Dobriyal (Sector 36)

As a corrupt cop who’s shocked into virtue by the heinousness of the Noida killings, Dobriyal doesn't have Massey’s scene-chewing role in Sector 36, but he makes an art out of absorbing, reacting and observing.

Chhaya Kadam (Laapata Ladies)

The anti-male tea-stall owner who is at once empowered and softened by the arrival of a ‘protege’ is the cherry on the cake of the 2024 Chhaya Kadam Trifecta of Grassroots Female Agency (Madgaon Express, All We Imagine As Light).

Faisal Malik (Panchayat 3)

In Malik’s deft hands, the oversized teddy bear of the TVF series morphs into a broken-hearted father working his way back into the village noise.

Kareena Kapoor Khan (The Buckingham Murders)

The actor sheds the baggage of stardom as a grieving British-Indian detective in Hansal Mehta’s imperfect but politically alert crime-thriller.