Ludo

Anurag Basu builds four separate stories on the logic of a board game. In ludo a throw of the dice affects all four colours at once, and here a step taken by one person alters the lives of three strangers simultaneously. The one throwing the dice is Sattu, the gangster played by Pankaj Tripathi, who sets the stories in motion. Akash, played by Aditya Roy Kapur, is trying to make a video disappear; Bittu, played by Abhishek Bachchan, comes out of prison looking for his daughter; Rahul, played by Rohit Saraf, runs off with a bag of money. Basu keeps bringing them together at intersections, and each time what looked like coincidence turns out to be a link in a chain. The tone never settles, deliberately: black comedy, violence and emotional passages arrive one after another. It was to open in cinemas in April 2020 and went to Netflix on 12 November 2020 because of the pandemic. Who it is for: viewers who enjoy layered, fast-cut Hindi anthologies and Pankaj Tripathi. Who it is not for: anyone who wants to follow a single story, or who will find the tonal shifts scattered.