Netflix’s Lust Stories 3 delves deeper than its predecessors, exploring the complex and often unacknowledged facets of human desire and its profound impact on relationships, identity, and personal expression, moving beyond mere sexual provocation.
IMAGE: The Lust Stories 3 Poster.
Key Points
- Lust Stories 3 shifts focus from provocative sex to the multifaceted nature of desire and its consequences in various human interactions.
- The anthology features four distinct stories by Vikramaditya Motwane, Kiran Rao, Shakun Batra, and Vishal Bhardwaj, each exploring a different aspect of desire.
- Shakun Batra’s segment, about a divorcing couple still desiring each other, is highlighted as the most convincing for its realistic portrayal of contradictory emotions.
- Vishal Bhardwaj’s story explores desire finding an outlet in imagination and literature when open expression is feared, leading to emotional space and acceptance.
The third instalment of Netflix’s anthology franchise is less interested in making lust provocative than in exploring what people do with desire when it enters their lives.
There was a time when a film called Lust Stories could provoke simply by talking openly about sex.
The first Lust Stories did exactly that, bringing female desire, sexual dissatisfaction and fantasy into mainstream conversation.
Lust Stories 2 moved the conversation towards what desire reveals about marriage, ageing, identity and relationships.
By the third film, the shock has worn off. And perhaps that is the point.
Vikramaditya Motwane, Kiran Rao, Shakun Batra and Vishal Bhardwaj take four very different approaches to the same basic human impulse.
One looks at what happens when a boundary is crossed.
Another turns desire into a tool.
A third looks at what remains when a relationship is falling apart.
The fourth gives desire somewhere else to go.
Story 1: Motwane and the boundary
IMAGE: Abhishek Banerjee, Radhika Apte, Vijay Varma and Konkona Sen Sharma in Lust Stories 3.
Vikramaditya Motwane’s Consenting Adults, starring Konkona Sen Sharma and Radhika Apte, starts with curiosity between friends and couples and takes it into territory they may not have expected.
The sexual experiment itself isn’t the most interesting part. What happens to the friendship and the marriages afterwards is.
Radhika Apte’s character initially says no and then, rather suddenly, agrees. I found that transition difficult to buy. There is a lot packed into that decision. She isn’t simply agreeing to sex. She is allowing desire into a friendship, knowing that whatever happens could change the relationship afterwards.
The film understands the risk, but moves past the emotional consequences rather quickly.
Story 2: Kiran Rao and the game of desire
IMAGE: Sana Thampi and Gurfateh Pirzada in Lust Stories 3..
Kiran Rao’s story, involving Gurfateh Pirzada’s pizza-delivery boy, Sana Thampi’s manicure artist and the twins, looks at lust as something that can be used.
The twins know how to use attraction to get what they want. The nail-salon girl understands the same game from the other side.
There is a potentially interesting story in that. What happens when desire is not just felt, but deliberately created and then used as leverage?
The film doesn’t stay with that question for very long. We see the deception and how the game works, but we don’t get much sense of what it does to the people involved.
That left me feeling that the sex was doing more work for the plot than for the story itself. A story containing sex isn’t necessarily a story about lust.
Story 3: The couple who still want each other
IMAGE: Ali Fazal and Radhikka Madan in Lust Stories 3.
Shakun Batra’s story about a divorcing couple is, for me, the most convincing of the four. Ali Fazal and Radhikka Madan play two people whose relationship has become toxic enough to end in divorce. Yet they still want each other.
That contradiction feels uncomfortably familiar.
A relationship is rarely just one thing. Love, companionship, sex, commitment and compatibility can all move in different directions. A marriage can be deeply dysfunctional while the physical attraction between two people remains very much alive.
So what happens when two people know they shouldn’t be together and still want each other? They try again. Not because the problems have disappeared, but because the desire hasn’t.
That is what makes the story work. Lust doesn’t fix their relationship. It simply shows that the relationship isn’t emotionally dead in every possible way.
Batra doesn’t try to make that contradiction comfortable, and that makes it more believable.
Story 4: When desire has nowhere to go
IMAGE: Aditi Rao Hydari and Sidharth in Lust Stories 3.
Vishal Bhardwaj’s Hyderabad-set story, with Aditi Rao Hydari and Siddharth, takes a quieter route. Here the problem isn’t simply the absence of intimacy. It is the fear of being judged for having desire at all.
Aditi’s character lives in a social and domestic world where her sexual imagination has very little room to exist openly. So it finds another outlet in literature, fantasy and eventually her own writing.
Desire isn’t always acted upon. Sometimes it gets written. The territory recalls Lipstick Under My Burkha, where female desire exists beneath layers of respectability and social expectation.
But Bhardwaj approaches it with much more playfulness and a distinctly period-film sensibility.
Then Siddharth’s character changes the equation. What he offers isn’t simply attraction. It is acceptance.
And that matters. Once desire doesn’t have to carry the fear of judgement, it can move from fantasy towards intimacy. Here, lust doesn’t simply find a sexual outlet. It finds emotional space.
Lust Stories 3: What happens after the shock wears off
IMAGE: The Lust Stories 3 poster.
Put the four stories together and an interesting pattern emerges. Desire crosses a boundary. It becomes a bargaining chip. It survives inside a relationship that is breaking down. It finds an outlet in imagination and, eventually, intimacy.
That also says something about how the Lust Stories franchise has changed.
The first film had to make us acknowledge that women have sexual desire. Lust Stories 2 was more interested in what that desire revealed about relationships and ourselves.
With the third film, the scandal has largely disappeared. So the question changes. Now that desire is no longer the scandal, what do people do with it?
That is where Lust Stories 3 becomes more interesting than its title might suggest. Some of the stories are playful, some are more serious, and not all of them go as deep as they could. But the better ones understand that desire can have consequences long after the sexual act itself.
And perhaps that is what lust really gives these stories. It isn’t just the thing that happens between two people. It’s what happens to them afterwards.
It’s not about who wanted whom. It’s about what that wanting did to them.
Photographs curated by Manisha Kotian/Rediff
