Lust Stories 3 Review: Four Takes on Desire, and Four Very Different Conversations

Lust Stories 3 follows the anthology's familiar template: four filmmakers, four stories, and desire somewhere at the centre of each. Vikramaditya Motwane, Kiran Rao, Shakun Batra and Vishal Bhardwaj approach the subject very differently, which is both the anthology's strength and its weakness.

Because ultimately, these aren't really four stories about lust.

They use lust to talk about other things.

Motwane uses it to explore female friendship. Rao turns it into a gateway to crime and a heist. Batra uses desire as a means of communication within a marriage. And Bhardwaj uses it to explore the importance of women having a voice.

That makes Lust Stories 3 an interesting, if uneven, continuation of the anthology. It doesn't reinvent the format, but it doesn't need to. What matters is what each filmmaker does with the freedom the premise gives them.

Vikramaditya Motwane: Desire and Friendship

Motwane's segment gets the anthology off to a lively start.

Shonali (Konkona Sen Sharma) and Padma (Radhika Apte) are friends stuck in marriages that have settled into predictable routines. A K-drama gives them the rather unconventional idea of swapping husbands during a holiday, with Vijay Varma and Abhishek Banerjee playing along as the husbands caught up in this experiment.

The premise is deliberately playful, but what makes the segment work is that it isn't really interested in the husband swap. It is interested in the women.

Konkona Sen Sharma plays Shonali as the more openly adventurous of the two, while Radhika Apte gives Padma a wonderful mixture of curiosity, hesitation and nervousness. Their friendship becomes the emotional centre of the story, and the film allows these women to talk about desire without embarrassment or moral judgement.

The lovely hot-tub scene between the two women captures this particularly well. What begins as a conversation about fantasy becomes something much more intimate: a recognition that they are women with desires, frustrations and lives beyond the roles they have been playing.

There is something liberating about watching them simply acknowledge that.

More importantly, the film also understands that acting on desire doesn't magically make life simpler. Fantasy and reality are very different things. The women discover that for themselves.

Motwane therefore uses lust less as a destination and more as a way of showing why female friendships matter—the space they create for honesty, vulnerability and the possibility of imagining another version of yourself.

Kiran Rao: Lust, Power and a Heist

Kiran Rao's segment is the one that worked least for me.

Lisa (Sana Thampi), a nail parlour employee, and Karan (Gurfateh Pirzada), a pizza delivery worker, find themselves at the centre of a story that initially appears to be examining lust as a form of power.

The idea is interesting. The execution isn't.

My biggest problem is that I never really felt the desire. It remained superficial, which made the eventual transformation into a crime/heist narrative feel more mechanical than organic. Once a particular plot point is revealed, the direction of the story becomes fairly easy to anticipate, and the eventual twist therefore loses much of its impact.

There is also something slightly dissonant about the segment within the Lust Stories framework. The other three films use desire as something deeply connected to relationships, identity or agency. Here, lust becomes more of a narrative mechanism that propels the plot.

That isn't inherently a bad idea. But I wanted to feel more of the lust before the story turned into a heist. There is a good film hiding somewhere inside this concept. I just don't think this is the version that fully finds it.

Shakun Batra: Lust as Communication

Batra's segment is the one that stayed with me the most.

Radhikka Madan and Ali Fazal play a couple going through a divorce, and what makes the story work is how recognisable their relationship feels. The film isn't interested in presenting marriage as a simple equation of love or lust. Instead, it explores what happens when people stop communicating—or perhaps never quite learn how to communicate what they actually want.

Here, desire becomes a language.

The emotional complications feel grounded rather than manufactured, and the performances help enormously. Gajraj Rao is wonderful in his role, though I couldn't help feeling that he was underused. His presence promises a larger contribution to the story than the screenplay eventually gives him.

The ending is what seals the segment for me. After spending much of the story watching something come apart, Batra leaves us with the possibility that endings don't necessarily have to mean emotional closure. Sometimes they can simply make room for something else.

It is the most emotionally complete of the four segments.

Vishal Bhardwaj: Lust and the Right to Have a Voice

Vishal Bhardwaj closes the anthology with a visually striking segment.

It wasn't my favourite story, but there is something compelling about the way Bhardwaj uses lust to explore female agency and the importance of having a voice.

The visual treatment is perhaps the segment's biggest strength. The colour palette and atmosphere immediately announce that we have entered a different cinematic world. Aditi Rao Hydari is a pleasure to watch and brings an intensity that suits the material.

Narratively, however, I didn't connect with it as strongly as I did with Motwane's or Batra's stories. Yet it works reasonably well as the closing piece because it leaves the anthology on the broader question of women's agency rather than simply desire itself.

The Verdict

The interesting thing about Lust Stories 3 is that all four filmmakers start with the same subject but end up somewhere completely different.

For Motwane, lust becomes a conversation about friendship.

For Rao, it becomes power and crime.

For Batra, it becomes communication within a relationship.

And for Bhardwaj, it becomes a question of voice and agency.

That variety is what makes the anthology worth watching, even when the individual segments don't land equally well.

It isn't a radical reinvention of the Lust Stories formula. But it doesn't need to be. At its best, it reminds us that desire is rarely just about sex. It can be about loneliness, curiosity, intimacy, freedom, communication, power—and sometimes simply the need to be heard.

Stream Lust Stories 3 on Netflix, and watch four filmmakers turn desire into stories about friendship, communication, power and finding your voice.