Netflix’s Lust Stories has always had a knack for making four unconnected short films feel like one cohesive, quietly unsettling experience, and the trailer for its third installment suggests that streak is continuing.
Released on Wednesday, the trailer confirms Lust Stories 3 will start streaming on September 18, bringing together an impressive lineup of directors and actors for another round of stories about love, desire, and everything messy in between.
Who’s Behind the Camera This Time
This season’s four short films come from Vikramaditya Motwane, Kiran Rao, Shakun Batra, and Vishal Bhardwaj, a mix of filmmakers known for very different storytelling styles, which has always been part of what makes this anthology interesting.
Rather than one consistent tone across the whole runtime, each segment gets to feel distinct, shaped entirely by its director’s own sensibility. If trailers focused on tension and complicated relationships are your thing this week, there’s plenty else worth checking out too.
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The Cast Leading Each Story
The trailer introduces the anthology’s leading women, Konkona Sen Sharma, Radhika Apte, Aditi Rao Hydari, Radhika Madan, and Sana Thampi, alongside a strong supporting lineup that includes Vijay Varma, Siddharth, Ali Fazal, Gurfateh Pirzada, and Abhishek Banerjee.
It’s a genuinely stacked cast for an anthology format, and having actors this recognizable across four separate stories should help each segment stand on its own rather than getting lost in the shuffle.
One particularly interesting shift this season involves Konkona Sen Sharma. She directed a chapter in the second season and was also involved in its writing, but this time around, she’s stepping in front of the camera instead, appearing as an actor rather than a filmmaker.
What Lust Stories 3 Is About
According to Netflix’s own synopsis, the anthology returns for four new chapters helmed by some of Indian cinema’s more distinctive voices, once again exploring lust, love, relationships, and repressed desire.
The trailer backs that up, showing glimpses of awkward interactions, difficult conversations, and the kind of unspoken tension that tends to sit underneath most relationships, all stitched together with a fair amount of humour to keep things from feeling too heavy.
That mix of discomfort and comedy has always been part of the anthology’s appeal. Rather than treating intimacy and desire as purely dramatic territory, Lust Stories tends to find the awkward, funny, occasionally cringe-inducing moments hiding inside these conversations, which makes it feel more grounded than a typical anthology built around romance.
Who’s Writing and Producing This Season
The writing credits this time around are fairly extensive, with Kiran Rao, Tanaji Dasgupta, Avinash Sampath, Sumukhi Suresh, Shakun Batra, Sameeha Sabnis, Ashwathi Namboodiri, Nitesh Bhatia, Utkarshini Vashishtha, and Vishal Bhardwaj all contributing across the four segments. Ronnie Screwvala and Ashi Dua are producing the anthology.
A Quick Look Back at the Franchise
Lust Stories first premiered back in 2018, bringing together four short films from some of India’s most well-known filmmakers, each one telling a self-contained story about relationships, sexuality, and the quieter tensions that show up in everyday life.
The format clearly struck a chord, since Netflix followed it up with a second season in 2023, bringing in new directors and updating the stories for more contemporary settings.
With Season 3 now expanding the roster even further and an ensemble this strong, backed by four fresh stories, the anthology looks set to continue its run as one of Netflix India’s more consistently talked about releases. Lust Stories 3 begins streaming on Netflix from September 18.