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Anurag Kashyap’s Monkey In A Cage Is A Thorny Post-MeToo Drama That Needlessly Provokes

OTTplay's critic Ishita Sengupta reports from the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) 2025. Here: A review of Anurag Kashyap's Monkey in a Cage (Bandar).

Ishita+Sengupta
Sep 09, 2025

Still from Monkey in a Cage (Bandar).

IN ANURAG KASHYAP'S Monkey in a Cage (Bandar) provocations arrive early. When a man held in custody is asked to sign papers, he refuses because he cannot read the document. “It’s in Marathi”. The cop’s retort flies back: “If you want to stay in Maharashtra, you have to know Marathi”. Later, there is an elaborate jail song, condemning everything from religion to caste-based divides.Kashyap has been angry for a while. The filmmaker’s rage has been so palpable that it percolates from social media posts to his films. His last couple of original works have been topical indictments — each more incensed than the other, and defined and undone by fury. At this point, his anger is a knotty glaze on his films — impossible to ignore but also distracting. The pattern has been so consistent that baiting seems to be the intent and the whole point. His latest, Monkey in a Cage, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, is a more obvious step towards that direction. Stream the latest films and shows with OTTplay Premium's Power Play monthly pack, for only Rs 149.With this, he is still underlining the brokenness of the system, but doing so through the contentious premise of a man falsely implicated in a rape case. This is tricky because, set in a country like India where sexual abuse is rampant, Monkey in a Cage chooses to focus entirely on the other side and thereby runs the risk of undermining a serious issue. Written by Sudip Sharma and Abhishek Banerjee (the team behind Pataal Lok), the film insists that being accused of rape is no less serious (the film does not draw an equivalence but also never addresses it), and this single-eyed approach espouses a thorny post-MeToo film that assumes to be more nuanced than what it really is.
Samar (a persuasive Bobby Deol), a washed-up television actor, is arrested from his house. He is clueless, but the cops are determined. Altercations follow till they reveal the cause. Samar pleads innocence, but lurid sex chats from his phone tell a different story. Arrest follows, and so does his turmoil in prison. His girlfriend (Saba Azad) tries to support, his sister (Sanya Malhotra) loses patience as Samar is thrown into the mix with other accused. From here, Monkey in a Cage prongs into two distinct narratives. One is a jaundiced prison drama, and the other is a story of the likes of men such as Samar, who, arrested for rape, face stigma in jail.On paper, the intersection is compelling, but Kashyap’s film (Sakshi Mehta is credited as a co-director) never manages to realise that despite brief flourishes. The writing attempts a Dostoevskyian anguish (where the punishment is the crime) but settles for a Darwinian resolution (survival of the fittest). The reason for this remains that Monkey in a Cage remains stridently facile. For instance, having an irrelevant actor at the centre of the crisis is an interesting choice, one that abates the power dynamics that lie at the heart of abuse, but the film resists exploring the complications that the presence of a man like this will invariably entail.Samar is an opaque character, a man prone to living inside his head. When he meets a girl on a dating app (Sapna Pabbi) and loses interest soon after, he promptly ignores her. This goes with his profession, where being self-consumed is a prerequisite. It is also a symptom of male entitlement.
But Monkey in a Cage treats it as a personality problem (“you know I can’t say no”), bereft of gender trappings. It does the same when unpacking the incident in question. Post MeToo, the complexity of what comprises rape has not just expanded, but the slipperiness of consent has come to the fore. Kashyap goes nowhere near this nor explores the intricacies of masculinity. Granted that it is not supposed to do so, but it is unbecoming of a film, dealing with a subject such as this, to look at false rape accusations and dismiss the complainant as a ‘crazy woman’, unable to handle rejection. If one side of the narrative is dehumanised, then, by default, the other side also resists empathy.Monkey in a Cage is also too reminiscent of early Kashyap films. There is an elaborate police station scene designed like the one in Ugly expletives bookending sentences, and it mostly feels derivative. This is the filmmaker’s big swing to be the enfant terrible of Hindi cinema, but he (still) comes across as an agent provocateur.

Stream Anurag Kashyap’s gripping films The Girl in Yellow Boots, Gangs of Wasseypur, and Gangs of Wasseypur - Part 2 now on JioHotstar via OTTplay Premium.

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