Bandar's unresolved questions
Most legal dramas are built around answers. Did the accused commit the crime? Will justice prevail? Who wins in the end? Audiences walk into such films expecting closure, a verdict that neatly separates truth from lies and innocence from guilt. But Anurag Kashyap's Bandar takes a very different route.
Instead of delivering certainty, the film leans into ambiguity. It feels less focused on figuring out a crime and more tuned to watching what transpires when a person gets stuck inside a whole system, a media storyline, and the public verdict. Through Samar's path, Kashyap nudges audiences to face uncomfortable realities about justice, reputation and even truth itself.
By the time the credits roll, Bandar leaves behind a set of unsettling questions that don't really come with clear answers and maybe were never intended to. Here are the most significant ones:
The movie keeps nudging that Samar (Bobby Deol) is really not some spotless person. He’s kind of selfish, emotionally careless, and morally compromised too. Still, the main question stays there: Can someone be a flawed human and yet be clean of a particular crime? Kashyap never really hands over hard evidence that settles it either way. Instead, he hovers around the way public opinion sprints to label people as either heroes or full-on monsters, like it’s a simple thing.
The accusation becomes bigger than the people involved. Media, police, prison authorities, and society seem to react to the story, not the facts. It’s like the film is asking, can objective truth still survive once competing narratives harden into “facts” in public imagination? Kashyap does this on purpose; he sort of leaves it unresolved, as if you’re supposed to carry the doubt.
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It also ends before any real legal resolution ever arrives. Samar stays caught inside the undertrial system, waiting and waiting. And because Kashyap doesn’t give viewers a courtroom climax, the attention moves away from “who wins the case?” and toward “what actually happens to one person while they’re stuck waiting for justice?”
Even if someone is eventually acquitted, can they recover their reputation, relationships, and sense of self? The film portrays a gradual erosion of Samar's dignity and identity, suggesting that the process itself may be the punishment. But it never answers whether recovery is possible.
The ending, where Samar is still waiting and there’s no clear trial outcome shown, seems intentional. Kashyap kind of resists giving the viewer that usual neat closure. That unresolved ending feels like a reflection of how real life works for countless undertrials, their lives stuck in limbo for years, while they wait on a system that moves painfully slowly.
These questions stay with you long after the film has ended. And maybe that’s Kashyap’s biggest achievement, not handing over answers, but making us remain seated in that discomfort of not having any, not yet.
