Agra, Kanu Behl’s third feature, reveals how the spaces we live in don’t just contain us, they shape our darkest compulsions; it exposes how patriarchy starves men of intimacy and punishes them for the hunger
Guru (a fearless Mohit Agarwal), a nervous young man, sits in a cramped cyber café, the fluorescent tube above him flickering in agitation, as though mirroring the restlessness crawling under his skin. He stares at the door, hoping the woman who he had been messaging on an online sex chat room to appear. The clock keeps ticking. The cold coffee before him remains untouched.
When Guru finally understands he has been stood up, humiliation spreads across his face like a slow burn. It’s a quiet scene, almost banal, but filmmaker Kanu Behl tilts it ever so slightly: the silence around Guru feels weaponised, and the space — narrow, intrusive, public — feels like a character in itself. This is Agra’s first sleight of hand: a small moment that detonates a much bigger, darker truth.
The anatomy of dysfunction
Kanu Behl has spent a decade chronicling the hidden bruises of India’s interior worlds. His debut, Titli (2014), tore open the underbelly of a family suffocated by its own patriarchal inheritance; Binnu Ka Sapna (2019), a short, sliced even deeper, revealing how trauma replicates itself in loops. With Agra, his third feature that premiered at the Un Certain Regard sidebar at Cannes 2023 and is releasing close on the heels of Despatch (2024), Behl completes a kind of thematic trilogy: a study of what happens when repression is not an exception but a habitat.
His cinema has always been drawn to the anatomy of dysfunction, particularly the inheritances passed down by patriarchy, the violence buried inside aspiration, and the claustrophobic architecture of Indian middle-class life. But here, he turns his gaze toward a force even more quietly devastating than poverty or patriarchy: sexual repression.
Also read: Kanu Behl interview: ‘Agra is a film about desire and sexual repression’
The plot of Agra — co-written by Behl and Atika Chauhan — is deceptively simple. Guru, a call-centre employee, lives in a small two-storey house with a mother (Vibha Chibber) who resents her life, a father (Rahul Roy) who long ago checked out of his marriage, and relatives who treat physical space as the final currency. The terrace becomes the ultimate prize: Guru wants it to build a room, a private sanctum to claim adulthood, intimacy, legitimacy. His mother wants it for a dental clinic with her niece Chhavi. His father, on the other hand, wants to develop it as a source of passive income. Guru is thus reduced to a kind of tenant in his own life: watched, infantilised, denied privacy, and stifled into near-madness.
The film unfolds in jagged bursts. Guru develops an obsessive fixation on a coworker. The father courts a new relationship with a woman significantly younger. The mother simmers with rage and resignation. These narrative strands coil around one another like exposed wires, sparking, threatening combustion. What drives Agra then is not event, but buildup — the slow erosion of the boundaries between rooms, between bodies, between personal fantasies and inherited scripts, and between parent and child.
A portrait of sexual confusion
In this environment, sex is no pleasure. It becomes pathology. Guru spends his days oscillating between dating apps, masturbation, and fantasies that are increasingly hard to distinguish from reality. Behl stages these sequences with a disturbing matter-of-factness: bodies appear, dissolve, morph, and taunt him. A fantastical early scene — a woman who turns into a rodent mid-tryst — clarifies that Guru does not inhabit stable ground. His mind is not just slippery but also starving. It’s not only that reality blurs with fantasy. It is that both are equally contaminated by repression.
The home in Agra isn’t a backdrop; it is the film’s primary antagonist and its emotional core. Our sexual lives affect the spaces we inhabit, Behl suggests — and it’s these same spaces that reshape who we become.
Yet Agra is never voyeuristic. Behl refuses the cheap sensationalism that stories of sexual frustration often fall into. Instead, he uses these themes to frame a darker portrait: a young man whose desires have fermented into something toxic, a result not of deviance but of systemic emotional starvation. The film recognises that patriarchy doesn’t just destroy women; it produces emotionally stunted men who then perpetuate the harm.
The performances are uniformly superb. Agarwal is a revelation in his debut performance. He carries his longing in his shoulders, his shame in the way he avoids mirrors. The actor gives Guru an unnerving transparency — his desire, shame, hunger, and rage swim too close to the surface. His Guru is a portrait of sexual confusion and emotional stagnation: his body slightly hunched, as if carrying the weight of the house itself.
Priyanka Bose’s Priti, a widowed café owner with her own wounds, enters the film as a possible salve, but Behl refuses to turn her into redemption. Their sexual relationship is transactional, tender, manipulative, liberating, and constraining all at once — which is precisely why it feels real. Chhibber and Roy embody two registers of parental damage: the bitter mother who wields guilt like a tool, and the father whose neglect has calcified into cruelty.
Pleasure and inherited trauma
What elevates Agra, however, is its command of craft. Saurabh Monga’s cinematography traps the characters within vertical frames, cluttered corners, and low ceilings, making the house feel less like a home and more like a psychological diagram. Parul Sondh’s production design deepens the suffocation — peeling paint, overstuffed rooms, and unresolved repairs become metaphors for stunted emotional lives.
And there is Behl, who keeps returning to architecture: stairwells that narrow like throats, doors that remain half-open, walls stained with the residue of old arguments. The home in Agra isn’t a backdrop; it is the film’s primary antagonist and its emotional core. Our sexual lives affect the spaces we inhabit, Behl suggests — and it’s these same spaces that reshape who we become.
Ultimately, Agra is a devastating study of repression — sexual, emotional, and generational. Behl isn’t interested in neat resolutions or moral packages. His gaze is steadier, harder: a recognition that men like Guru are both casualties of a system and its future enforcers. Behl’s directorial eye here moves with a cold, almost forensic precision, a culmination of everything he’s been circling for a decade: an exacting, almost surgical understanding of how spaces hold emotional residue and how characters fracture inside those spaces.
If anything, Agra marks Behl’s most controlled and fearless filmmaking to date. He studies behaviour with a rigour that borders on forensic, letting discomfort sit long enough to turn revelatory. His choices are brave precisely because they are unapologetic. The film’s ending settles like a bruise just beneath the skin, insisting that neither pleasure nor proximity can wash away inherited trauma. In a landscape where cinema often sanitises desire, Behl forces it back into the messy, troubling human territory it actually occupies.
