So far, 2025 has been a year of big budget star-powered theatrical releases—right from Sikandar, Jaat, Raid 2, Sky Force, Kesari Chapter 2: The Untold Story of Jallianwala Bagh, Deva, Badass Ravikumar, Chhaava (the highest grossing Indian film of the year with a domestic net collection : 604.1cr) to the multi-starrer Housefull 5 (second highest grossing Hindi film of the year with a domestic net collection of Rs 162.69 cr) till the time of going to press). But with crass cinema still being peddled as mass cinema and propaganda movies graduating into sleek mainstream event films, it seems Bollywood has sacrificed the art and integrity of cinema on the excel-sheet wrapped alter of commerce. However, all is not lost. Beyond the spotlight of mainstream Bollywood, Hindi cinema is having its own moment thanks to the indie filmmakers and the non-conformists—many of whom are debutants. Here are 9 such 2025 releases—daring, edgy, and unconventional—that every cinephile should sample:

Superboys of Malegaon

OTT Platform: Prime Video

Directed by Reema Kagti and written by Varun Grover, this quirky movie takes inspiration from Faiza Ahmad Khan’s 2008 documentary titled Malegaon Ka Superman about a mofussil town’s cinema obsession and a bunch of village oddballs turning into DIY filmmakers. With heartfelt performances by Adarsh Gourav (as Nasir), Shashank Arora (as Shafique), and Vineet Kumar (as Farogh), this delightful little gem, much like Cinema Paradiso, is an ode to the magic of cinema and the cinephiles.

Stolen

OTT Platform: Prime Video

Two well-off brothers, Gautam (Abhishek Banerjee) and Raman (Shubham Vardhan) Bansal, are sucked into an abduction drama when a poor tribal woman’s (Mia Maelzer) infant daughter goes missing from the railway station one night. What follows is a chaotic night that goes from bad to worse. Karan Tejpal’s directorial debut, based on a real incident, is a nofrills, raw, and edgy, Nh10-coded survival thriller road movie that deals with misinformation and mob violence, growing class divide and desperation of the marginalised, and throws light on the dark and exploitative nature of the booming rent-a-womb industry.

Chidiya

OTT Platform: TBA

Mehran Amrohi’s directorial debut that has taken him a decade to get a theatrical release, is a heartwarming tale of two brothers, Shanu and Bua (Svar Kamble and Ayush Pathak). Although reeling under financial constraint, they live a content life with their widowed mother Vaishnavi (Amruta Subhash). Vaishnavi’s kind-hearted brother-in-law Balai (Vinay Pathak), a spot boy in the Hindi film industry, who lives next door, doubles up as a father figure to the boys. One fine day Shanu gets a gift—a shuttlecock. And just like that he gets smitten by badminton and starts dreaming of playing the game. It is a story of innocence, resilience, hope, small joys, community spirit, and dreams.

Sister Midnight

OTT Platform: TBA

Karan Kandhari’s debut feature, Radhika Apte-starrer Sister Midnight, is a whimsical, genrebending, trippy black comedy punctuated with feminist subversion. Shot on 35mm film, with a visual style reminiscent of Wes Anderson, the surreal Mumbai fable starts off with two misfits, Uma and Gopal, getting into an arranged marriage and landing up in a suffocatingly cramped one-room apartment in the dead of night—a setting perfect for a tale of a woman we will see slowly getting squished under pressures of social expectations before she unravels in a macabre rebellion.

Crazxy

OTT Platform: Prime Video

Dr Abhimanyu Sood (Sohum Shah) has a death-by-medical-negligence case against him. He is on his way to pay off the victim’s family. But suddenly he finds himself in a situation where he needs to use the money that can buy him his freedom, as a ransom to save his daughter. Soham Shah, returning to the big screen after seven years, more than makes up for the long hiatus as he aces the layered character. A road movie, a psychological thriller, a one-character film, an homage to Amitabh Bachchan, a movie with a powerful message on children with Down syndrome—Girish Kohli's directorial debut Crazxy is all of these and more.

The Storyteller

OTT Platform: Disney+ Hotstar

An adaptation of Satyajit Ray’s short story, Golpo Boliye Tarini Khuro, Ananth Mahadevan’s The Storyteller is about a rich and insomniac Gujarati cotton businessman, Ratan Garodia (Adil Hussain), who hires a retired storyteller, Tarini Bandhopadhay (Paresh Rawal), to tell him bedtime stories. Replete with witty conversations between the Bong intellectual and the Gujju capitalist who are not only separated by ideology and geography but as it turns out, also by intent, the movie, among other things, raises important questions about plagiarism and authorship— does a story belong to its narrator or the writer?

Mrs. 

OTT Platform: Zee5

Directed by Arati Kadav, Mrs. is a remake of the 2021 Malayalam film The Great Indian Kitchen and follows Richa’s (played by Sanya Malhotra) life—a newly married housewife—as she tries to cope with her daily responsibilities, which mostly revolve around arduous kitchen chores. With the constant noise of cooking and grinding doubling up as poignant metaphors for her daily grind, the kitchen starts to feel like a pressure cooker Richa is stuck in. The pressure keeps mounting until one day she bursts.

The Mehta Boys

OTT Platform: Prime Video

Boman Irani’s directorial debut The Mehta Boys, which he has cowritten along with Oscar-winning writer Alexander Dinelaris Jr of Birdman fame, stars Irani (Shiv Mehta) and Avinash Tiwary (Amay Mehta) as an estranged fatherson duo who find themselves stuck together for 48 long hours. As the two men confront each other and their dysfunctional relationship, there is a deeper understanding towards both. It is a heartfelt family drama with impressive performances by Irani, Tiwary and Puja Sarup (Shiv’s pragmatic daughter Anu).

Dilli Dark

OTT Platform: MUBI

Dibakar Das Roy’s debut feature Dilli Dark is a 100-minute-long daring and edgy dark comedy about Michael Okeke (played by Samuel Abiola Robinson)—a Nigerian MBA student with a parttime job of a delivery boy for a cocaine dealer—navigating through racial discrimination, fair-skin bias, and deepseated prejudices against the broader African diaspora in Delhi. Much like Nicholas Kharkongor's 2019 movie Axone, Dilli Dark exposes the casual racism and social exclusion often faced by the outsider in the National capital