‘Agra’ Movie Review: Lust and Loathing in Small-town India

Most Indian moviegoers are wired to like cinema that squeezes lemonade out of life’s limes. The country has such deep social faultlines that we automatically appreciate stories looking for silver linings within them. Take the middle-class space crunch, a problem as old as time. Over the years, it’s been softened by several movie genres: the joint-family saga that emphasizes the happy chaos of communal living, the romcom or sex comedy where everyone gets a say, the love story thriving on secrets and shadows. Think Shubh Mangal Saavdhan, where a small-town household weighs in on the hero’s erectile dysfunction; think The Affair, Hardik Mehta’s short film about a married couple from a cramped Mumbai flat meeting like covert lovers after work. The movies sell nightmares as lesser dreams; we see no breathing room, but the characters reframe it as togetherness and proximity.

A Kanu Behl film, however, squeezes cinema directly out of life’s limes. The lime is then smeared all over the open wounds and eyes of the viewer until they forget that lemonade ever existed. His latest, Agra, reclaims the naked core of India’s space-crunch epidemic. It revolves around a 24-year-old man, Guru (Mohit Agarwal), whose sexual repression is a natural manifestation of the cage he lives in. His is a truth that we go to cinema halls to forget: a Monsoon Wedding-coded character without the wedding. Along with his bitter mother (Vibha Chhibber), Guru occupies the ground floor of a rusty two-story house; his father (Rahul Roy) lives above them with his second wife (Sonal Jha). Guru is visibly a virgin, and he spends most of his days masturbating in the toilet, rummaging through online sex chatrooms (“24m Agra, meet?”), objectifying girls with his gaze, and begging his dad for a single room on a terrace that every family member is eyeing. This terrace becomes the mythical gold at the end of the rainbow. His mother wants the space to start a dental clinic with her niece, but Guru wants it so badly that his rabid mind creates an imaginary girlfriend (Ruhani Sharma) to legitimize his ‘sickness’.

Guru’s reality is so infected that when he fixes a date with an anonymous chat handle, the humiliation of getting stood up is offset by a porn-coded moment. It’s inevitable that a rapey Guru is going to jump his cousin, Chhavi (Aanchal Goswami), when she comes to claim the terrace for her clinic; it’s also inevitable that he will nearly kill the family doctor who has preyed on him for years under the pretext of treating him. His loneliness is so primal, so total, that you wonder if he’s losing his marbles to be eligible for the city’s famous psychiatric hospital because it has more space. When the mentally damaged Guru meets the physically compromised Priti (Priyanka Bose) — a polio-afflicted widow stuck in her own legal battles — sparks fly because their fire is reduced to fumes. Mohit Agarwal disappears into the role of internalised desire so fully that it’s hard to remember his face after the film; there’s almost no filter between thought and action. Ditto for Priyanka Bose as Priti; she manages to be many things at once — sincere, sly, aggressive, tender, a lover, a striver — by debunking the myth of small-town morality. Their relationship is driven by a kind of need that’s often stigmatised by stories about star-crossed outcasts.

A still from 'Agra'

In terms of the Kanu Behl lens, Agra is the opposite of rose-tinted glasses. If anything, the film is composed of the broken shards of those glasses. In this case, the debris of mainstream cinema: as if to imply that Agra is the real-world version of the screen-shaped escapism we consume. For instance, when Guru visits Priti at her cyber cafe the first time, we hear a song from Kabhi Haan Kabhi Naa — a movie about a flawed boy yearning for love that, like Agra, begins with a fever dream (or delusion). On his next visit, we hear a track from Aashiqui, the Bollywood hit about an angsty hero who resents his father for finding a second wife; the actor who played that young hero, Rahul Roy, plays the incorrigible father in this film. When Guru is stood up by his chatroom ‘friend’ at the cafe, the girl he visualises instead evokes the erotic subway scene from Shame, the stirring film starring Michael Fassbender as a sex addict. Even when Guru’s cousin Chhavi arrives like a breath of fresh air to a beaten family, I thought of Shah Rukh Khan’s angel-styled entry in Kal Ho Naa Ho — except here, of course, the saviour is co-opted by the property dispute. A visual transition of colours mixing like paint combs out Guru’s fantasies from his truth; it plays the role of the totem in Inception, to an extent where you hope it doesn’t appear after he meets Priti.

The opening piece features Guru, uh, fornicating with a giant rat, bringing to mind the conflict of Trapped, the Vikramaditya Motwane-directed survival thriller about unlimited aspirations and limited spaces. Which is also to say that, for a change, Behl finds morbid humour in the self-seriousness of his oeuvre. Early on, there’s a scene so sad that it’s almost funny. Guru’s mother first threatens suicide by dousing herself in kerosene to get her husband to give her the terrace, but once their argument subsides, Guru himself threatens suicide by drinking phenyl (“this time I’ll do it”) to secure that room. This self-harm contest is the only way to be heard in a family desensitised by its own poison. The callbacks toy with us, too. A shot of the family’s shocked faces when they notice Guru is cuckoo returns when he brings Priti to meet them; at this point, the suspense is that you still don’t know if she’s real. It says something that he finds her too conveniently, old songs score their initial encounters, and the sex feels preordained. Guru’s mindscape remains the driver of the narrative, almost like he’s willed her into existence.

A still from 'Agra'

Before Priti, Guru seems to be in a spiral that often results in a headline-making explosion. He starts to become both the Frankenstein and the monster of his own stunted masculinity. An ‘ending’ is imminent. But it’s also a bit like watching the first act of a superhero origin story. Like millions of repressed and internet-educated males, Guru (whose name means “spiritual guide”) is convinced that the actual act of sex will solve everything. Copulation will be his cape and his cure; it will be his ‘coming’-of-age device. And once he sleeps with Priti, the cape emerges. The post-nut clarity takes over. He becomes more confident, tackles the family issue, and finds solutions. He behaves like a man, not a boy. Even when he realises that Priti’s feelings are not pure, he refuses to let go, because he’s evolved enough to understand that every bond in his ecosystem is transactional; it’s just about trusting the illusion of companionship harder. The sex is staged accordingly — not titillating, more a medium of negotiation and empowerment. The performers deserve credit not just for shedding their inhibitions, but for normalising the mundanity of the act. For a culture that favours the silence of suppression over the wails of pleasure, sex becomes a surrogate for greetings, goodbyes, difficult questions and deceptive answers.

The remarkable thing about Agra is its ability to expose the lore of sexual awakenings. The final scene is anticlimactic, but oddly poignant for the way it bursts the bubble. After all, superheroes are fictional — lemonade, not lime — and this is life. There’s a sense here that it’s not just about Guru’s years; it’s a generational chain of masculinity that cannot be snapped by the newness of other bodies. The effect wears off, like a pain-killer that can no longer contain the permanence of the disease. The wilderness of freedom is hard to process after decades of caged cravings. At this point, the nihilism of Behl’s Titli and Binnu Ka Sapna — films about youngsters trying to break the cycle in similar spaces — resurfaces, but more as a revelation than a twist. Men like Guru are their own kryptonite because they are, for better or worse, their father’s sons. The more they resist, the more they inherit. They become cautionary tales masquerading as coming-of-age dramas: pressure cookers posing as hot vessels. For Guru, repression is a religion, and sex remains more of an angry confession than a prayer. This conceit is what completes the film, a phenomenon disguised as a story. Because in Agra, all the world is a rage — and all the men are merely its layers.