(This article was updated on February 21, 2025) “I’m a typed director. If I made ‘Cinderella,’ the audience would immediately be looking for a body in the coach”, Alfred Hitchcock once quipped, as only Hitchcock could. His films weren’t just suspenseful—they were exercises in psychological endurance, laced with thrills and a creeping suspicion that something sinister was lurking just out of frame. He didn’t just want to entertain; he wanted to unsettle, disturb, and delight in equal measure.
Cinema, at its best, isn’t merely about escape. It’s about riveting the unriveted, moving the unmoved, burrowing under the skin and staying there. Some films glide along like fairytales, soft-edged and comforting. Others? They coil around your mind like a bad dream, daring you to look away but knowing you won’t.
Bollywood, too, has its share of such films—twisted, unflinching, and deeply unsettling. And having sat through my fair share, here are 10 of the most disturbing ones that refuse to let go.
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1. Ugly (2013)
Anurag Kashyap’s film isn’t merely a thriller—it’s a slow-burn autopsy of human frailty, peeling back layer after layer until only raw, unfiltered dread remains. The movie begins with a seemingly routine horror—the kind that plays out in newspapers and police reports every day. A little girl disappears from her father’s car. What follows is a descent into the kind of darkness that doesn’t just lurk in alleyways but seeps into the very fabric of our world.
A master of modern noir, Kashyap orchestrates an atmosphere so thick with tension it’s suffocating. The characters aren’t just flawed. They’re corrosive, driven by desperation, greed, and a moral decay so deep that even their noblest instincts are suspect. The film is relentless, twisting its narrative knife deeper with each revelation, and offers no relief.
It premiered at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival’s Directors’ Fortnight.
Where to Watch: JioHotstar, YouTube
2. Sadma (1983)
Few performances in Indian cinema feel as indelible as Sridevi’s turn in Sadma. Her role demanded not just skill, but a childlike vulnerability rarely seen on screen. Early in her career, she delivered a performance so immersive, so achingly delicate, that it cemented her as one of the finest actors of her generation.
At its heart, Sadma is a tender yet devastating story of memory, loss, and the fragile nature of human connection. After suffering a head injury, Sridevi’s character regresses to childhood, her world unspooling in the care of Kamal Haasan’s quiet, steadfast schoolteacher. The relationship that forms between them is at once heartbreaking and deeply humane—free of sentimentality, yet heavy with unspoken emotion.
Balu Mahendra’s direction is gentle but unflinching. A remake of Mahendra’s own Tamil film Moondram Pirai (1982), Sadma transcended language, earning both critical reverence and an enduring cult legacy. It’s the kind of film that lingers, a memory that refuses to fade.
Where to watch: YouTube
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3. Talvar (2015)
This Meghna Gulzar directorial tells the story of the 2008 Arushi Talvar double murder case with as much fairness as a film possibly can. Written by Vishal Bhardwaj, the film combines two genres: police procedural and crime drama. Without indulging in any form of escapism, the film serves us what is real with honesty. Told in a Rashomon-like style, embodying all possible perspectives, the film traverses through the meshes of reality with boldness and candour.
Talvar premiered at the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival in the special-presentation section. It was also screened at major film festivals like BFI London Film Festival and Busan International Film Festival and won Vishal Bhardwaj a National Award for the Best Adapted Screenplay.
Where to Watch: JioHotstar
Similar To Most Disturbing Movies: Talvar (2015) Review: Hindi Cinema’s Finest Police Procedural
4. Love Sex Aur Dhoka (2010)
Blunt and defiantly non-formulaic, Love Sex aur Dhokha is a cinematic gut punch. Dibakar Banerjee dismantles the very framework of commercial storytelling, discarding polish and pretense in favor of raw, unfiltered immediacy. Shot entirely on handheld cameras and CCTV footage, the film peels back the underbelly of a voyeuristic society, holding up a mirror so uncomfortably close that you can see every crack.
Banerjee doesn’t just push boundaries; he obliterates them while blurring the line between artistic, experimental, and commercial cinema. He exposes a world where surveillance is omnipresent, intimacy is currency, and morality is a shifting, often hypocritical construct. The film’s anthology-like structure is a smart narrative device. It supplements the multitudes of perspectives that it means to show.
Where to Watch: Prime Video, JioHotstar, YouTube
5. NH 10 (2015)
NH10 is not an easy film to watch. Anushka Sharma’s debut production revolves around a couple’s encounter with a menacing gang when on their vacation. Extremely gripping, taut and gut-wrenching, NH10 is held together by solid performances all round. Exceptional cinematography and sound work add to the gory atmospherics well enough to draw you in. A meaningful thriller with a subtly suffused social message interspersed with dynamic storytelling, NH10 will stay with you long after you’ve finished watching it.
Where to Watch: Prime Video, JioHotstar, ZeeStudios
6. 15 Park Avenue (2005)
Schizophrenia isn’t just an affliction in Aparna Sen’s cinematic world—it’s a fracture that splinters perception, memory, and family itself. The film doesn’t merely chronicle the struggles of a young woman grappling with the condition; it immerses the audience in the unsettling space between delusion and reality.
With a powerhouse ensemble—Shabana Azmi, Konkona Sen Sharma, Soumitra Chatterjee, Waheeda Rehman, Dhritiman Chatterjee, and Rahul Bose—the film is a masterclass in restrained, deeply human performances. But its true power lies in Sen’s storytelling. She treats schizophrenia not as a dramatic device, but as an ever-shifting lens through which normalcy becomes entirely subjective.
The result? A film that’s as disorienting as it is deeply empathetic. It doesn’t just depict a world—it reshapes your understanding of it. Sen’s real genius lies in weaving of a climax open to interpretations.
7. Bandit Queen (1994)
Few films have the audacity to shake a nation to its core quite like Shekhar Kapur’s Bandit Queen. A brutal, unrelenting narrative of power, caste, and vengeance, the film reconstructs the life of Phoolan Devi, a woman who lived through—and fought against—the very worst of India’s systemic violence. Adapted from Mala Sen’s India’s Bandit Queen: The True Story of Phoolan Devi, it doesn’t just depict oppression; it forces you to confront it, frame by harrowing frame.
Kapur strips away sentimentality, presenting a world where casteism isn’t just a backdrop—it’s a mechanism of cruelty, governing who lives, who suffers, and who is silenced. The film was banned in India, largely for its graphic, unsparing depictions of rape and female subjugation.
Despite the controversy, Bandit Queen commanded global attention, premiering at Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight in 1994, screening at the Edinburgh Film Festival, and even securing India’s submission for Best Foreign Language Film at the Academy Awards—though it didn’t make the final cut. It did, however, claim three National Awards, including Best Feature Film in Hindi.
For all its cinematic brilliance, Bandit Queen is not an easy watch—nor should it be. It is as disturbing as it is necessary, a film that refuses to let history be rewritten or its horrors sanitized.
Where to Watch: Prime Video, YouTube
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8. Black Friday (2004)
Centred around the 1993 bomb blasts, Black Friday is based on Hussain Zaidi’s book titled Black Friday: The True Story of the Bombay Bomb Blasts. Recounting the gruesome events that transpired over a single day and changed Mumbai forever, Anurag Kashyap’s screen adaptation is a riveting, realistic, true-to-life depiction of the inhumane brutality. Told from the perspective of all involved parties, from conspirators to victims, it involves a Rashomon-like approach, much like Talvar.
The film premiered at the 2004 Locarno International Film Festival, where it was a nominee for the Golden Leopard.
Where to Watch: JioHotstar
9. Raman Raghav 2.0 (2016)
Tarantinoesque in its treatment, this is Kashyap delving deep into the subterranean of the soul. Each chapter is a cinematic delight and the sum is greater than the parts. Myriad sub-shades apart, this is a story of two lost souls swimming and kicking and killing in a cesspool trying to find each other, looking for completion, for a certain satisfaction. But on this remorseless, psychotic journey there’s no relief given, none asked.
And the down, down, downward spiral continues, like there’s no tomorrow, no heaven or hell, just an inexorable compulsion to kill. Catch our full review here: Raman Raghav 2.0 (2016): Delves Into The Subterranean Of The Soul
Where to Watch: Zee5
10. That Girl in Yellow Boots (2010)
Another Kashyap film on the list and unsurprisingly so, given his brand of cinema. “An unnervingly realistic portrait of unimaginable pain—one with an ending you’ll wish you could forget,” wrote Kia Makarechi of The Huffington Post about it. That Girl in Yellow Boots lures you in with a premise that seems almost familiar—a British woman, adrift in India, searching for a father she barely remembers. But as she navigates the shadowy underbelly of an unfamiliar land, the film strips away any illusion of safety. What begins as a quest for identity mutates into something darker, something deeply unsettling.
Kalki Koechlin is raw and restrained, while Naseeruddin Shah’s presence looms with quiet intensity. Kashyap refuses to soften the film’s relentless sense of unease. Premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival, before making its way to Venice and the South Asian International Film Festival, That Girl in Yellow Boots is a film you can’t easily shake off.
Where to Watch: Netflix, JioHotstar
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