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Beyond the Tough Guy: How Films Are Making Space For Men’s Inner Lives

From Agra to Joyland to Tora’s Husband, a new wave of South Asian cinema is dismantling the idea of the “strong man.”

| Manasvi Pote
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Illustration: (Rutuja Pote)

There’s a kind of stillness that belongs only to men who’ve run out of language. Kanu Behl’s Agra lives inside that stillness. The film unfolds in a crumbling Agra house where the walls feel sentient, heavy with years of unspoken resentment. Its protagonist, Guru, wants a room of his own. What he’s really asking for is a life that isn’t borrowed from his father’s mistakes.

Behl’s cinema studies repression as he treats silence like dialogue, using pauses as punctuation marks for rage and longing. “Human beings express more in the silences between their sentences than in their words,” he says. “Our faces are our sculptures. We say more through our and our bodies.” Agra takes that belief to its haunting extreme. Guru doesn’t articulate his tragedy; he becomes it. His body carries the vocabulary that his mouth refuses.

For Behl, even a ‘functional’ home hides a quiet ache. “The human condition has an immense loneliness attached to it,” he says. “I felt it early on, even though I grew up in a completely ‘functional’ house.” That idea forms the foundation of Agra — a house that isn’t broken, only built to contain silence. Watching the film feels like watching patriarchy rot in real time. The dysfunction is inherited, not invented; men continue to pass down emotional illiteracy like family property.

Behl calls Guru’s story “a reverse coming of age.” It’s the undoing of a man, brick by brick, word by unsaid word. Guru’s implosion is quiet, almost domestic. The house becomes a metaphor, a mirror, and a mausoleum. The tragedy isn’t that he breaks; it’s that he can’t find a language for his breaking.

And Agra isn’t alone. Across South Asian cinema, filmmakers are digging into the same quiet soil,  not to glorify suffering, but to understand what happens when men finally stop performing it.

Joyland (2022)

In Lahore’s narrow homes and neon-lit alleys, Saim Sadiq’s Joyland unfolds like a whisper between men who were never taught how to speak. Haider, a quiet husband, finds momentary liberation in dance — a rebellion that looks more like grace than defiance. “I liked the idea of a guy who was a follower and not a leader,” Sadiq says. “He’s good at being a homemaker, good at being around women stronger than him, and he’s happy to do it. What’s wrong with that?” Haider’s tragedy, Sadiq insists, lies in his silence. “Men struggle with words when it comes to expressing feelings. They’ve never been given a language to talk about emotions. Women have developed one through crying, sarcasm, and wit, but men have not. So they just don’t talk. They suppress, they misfire, they joke, they rage. Haider has so many things inside him, but no language to express them.”

In Joyland, every pause becomes a political statement. Each moment of hesitation becomes a kind of mourning for all the things men might have said if the world had allowed them tenderness.

Not Today (2021)

Aditya Kripalani’s Not Today opens with a man on the edge of ending his life. But instead of dramatising the act, it lingers on the voice at the other end of a helpline — two strangers, one long night, and the fragile honesty that comes when performance drops. “When I was researching for the film,” Kripalani says, “I realised that men commit suicide far more — 65 to 75 per cent of all cases in most cities. That’s because men don’t express themselves. Their feelings just remain inside.” He speaks of what he’s seen and lived: “Even my dad, if I ask him how he’s doing, even with bad health — he’ll say, ‘All fine.’ That’s conditioning. Men have been told not to show weakness. Even the relationships they have with other men are competitive, not emotional. Men are used to talking about feelings only with women, never with each other.”

In Not Today, that absence of touch, of vulnerability, is the real antagonist. Two voices over a phone call reclaim something quietly revolutionary: the right of men to be heard without shame.

Tora’s Husband (2022)

Rima Das’ Tora’s Husband studies the slow erosion of a man’s spirit. Jaan, a baker in a small Assamese town, holds together his family, his business, and his body until all three begin to fail. “I have always been drawn to quiet emotions, the kind that don’t scream but stay with you,” Das says. “I wanted to look at masculinity not through aggression or grand gestures, but through what men carry silently.” The film was shot over two years in her hometown. “During the pandemic,” she says, “I saw many men trying to stay strong for their families even as they were breaking inside. That quiet collapse was also a kind of conflict.”

Das doesn’t frame Jaan as weak; she frames him as human. “Masculinity is ingrained in men unknowingly,” she explains. “The husband is not aware of how he is making all the decisions. Tora is important, but unknowingly, she is overshadowed.” Her camera lingers on the smallest gestures: the tired slump of shoulders, a man sitting alone in his car, a half-eaten dinner gone cold. “Ultimately,” she says, “it was about capturing poetry in the everyday — a man driving through rain, a quiet dinner, a small argument about a flower pot. Those ordinary moments where love, fatigue, and dignity quietly coexist.”

Kumbalangi Nights (2019)

Few Indian films have examined male vulnerability with the grace of Madhu C. Narayanan’s Kumbalangi Nights. Advait More, a video editor, calls it “one of the most realistic portrayals of the helplessness of brothers in the absence of a feminine figure in their lives.” The film’s men stumble, sulk, and mend, discovering care in chaos. Sanju Shibu, a Kerala-born creative now in Mumbai, puts it more starkly: “Soubin as Saji is that unemployed man who thinks living off his friend’s money is cool. Until that day, he loses his only friend and cries in the arms of a therapist. Saji tells us how it’s not weak but stronger to seek help when you really need to.”

Kumbalangi Nights turns the act of asking for help into an assertion of strength. In its universe, masculinity is no longer defined by control but by the courage to collapse.

Doob: No Bed of Roses (2017)

Most films about guilt offer forgiveness as an exit. Doob: No Bed of Roses refuses. Irrfan Khan plays Javed Hasan, a filmmaker unravelling after his affair destroys his family. The camera never absolves him; it watches him sink into remorse that never resolves. This is grief without spectacle, tenderness without reward.

Court (2014)

Chaitanya Tamhane’s Court isn’t a film about masculinity in the traditional sense, yet it quietly exposes how systems shape the emotional lives of men. Narayan Kamble, a folk singer accused of abetment to suicide, barely speaks, but the film studies him through the bureaucratic machinery that crushes dignity long before it crushes freedom. The tragedy of Court lies in how ordinary the injustice feels. The male characters around Kamble — the clerk, the public prosecutor and the judge move through life in a fog of rules and routine, each one numbed by the very system they uphold.

Screenwriters Who Are Rewriting Men

Beyond these films are the storytellers who shaped them — screenwriters and actors who understand that to unlearn masculinity on screen, you must first listen to its silences off it.

Hardik Mehta, director of Amdavad Ma Famous, Kaamyaab, and Decoupled, sees the men he writes as “creatures of decline.” For him, loneliness is not a flaw but a condition many men quietly slip into. “Men at this age would prefer to adapt to loneliness than be answerable to a family or a partner or daughters or sons,” he says. What interests him is the tipping point. “It’s extremely important for me to write about men as vulnerable. To show them at a tipping point and from that vulnerability let them find themselves, and at the same time also find the goal they are going for. The audience today relates to these men.”

Dhruv Sehgal, creator of Little Things and Modern Love: Mumbai, rejects writing men as archetypes. “When writing characters, I think it’s important to write them as developed minds and not as tools who have to perform a certain task for the script,” he says. He sees today’s men as “more aware of their inner chaos… simply because of the awareness that is spread through social media,” but he refuses to sermonise that shift. “I’m not trying to give it any language or hold any mirror. I just try to understand it from different aspects… it’s not a responsibility, it’s an exploration of the world, of myself, and of people.”

For Sumit Roy, the screenwriter behind Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahaani and Gehraiyaan, the shift in masculinity began with Kumbalangi Nights. “It’s the kind of film that is like a soothing balm to men traumatised by the expectations patriarchy forces on them,” he says. “It’s okay to not have your shit sorted out even if you’re a man… and that it’s ok to cry a little.” His own writing reflects that internal fracture. “Zain in Gehraiyaan is a hustler projecting an aggressive, brash version of himself. But internally he’s broken… caught between the man he wants to be and the performance of manliness society expects of him — and this dichotomy defines his tragic choices.”

Karan Shrikant Sharma, known for Satyaprem Ki Katha and Anandi Gopal, sees cinematic men as shaped by their environments, not their egos. “Amol Palekar in Choti Si Baat and Baaton Baaton Mein… he was all such things — vulnerable, confused, soft… his core is something he can’t change and that’s the only thing that helps him win the girl’s and the audience’s heart,” he says. “When I read about the real-life story of Anandi Gopal Joshi… there was a strong shift in the way I looked at and started crafting my male characters.” He believes the writer’s own wiring plays a role too: “Your upbringing, your ecosystems, your moral compass subconsciously make even those characters make the choices that they make.”

Saurabh Bharat, writer of Doctor G and head of Scriptors, carries the emotional contradictions of his earlier life as a doctor into his work. “October… probably the most tender male protagonist I’ve seen in modern Hindi cinema,” he says. “Those films made me realise men don’t have to ‘arc’ through strength; they can arc through surrender.” His real-world encounters sharpen that instinct. “I’ve seen men cry in labour rooms when their wives deliver, and also men who can’t say a word when told they’re infertile. That duality stays with me.” For him, the pressure shaping male characters is cultural as much as industrial. “We are feeling the pressure of writing a ‘Hero’ rather than a ‘Male Protagonist’… I still want to see more ordinary men, not as villains or saviours, but as humans trying to love better.”

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Image: (IMDb)

Actor Shashank Arora, known for Titli, Made in Heaven, and Superboys of Malegaon, has spent his career resisting caricature. “Titli is literally about how patriarchy reinvents itself from one generation to another. The struggle is as much an external one as it is internal,” he says. “The key is not looking up at the character as a stalwart, or to look down at him as an example that needs to be set. To understand him and simply speak his words with truth is half the challenge.” For him, performance itself is a protest. “Almost each and every character I’ve played has been an effort to smash this uni-dimensional portrayal… which leads to a perpetual ‘heroising’ of a very superficial, misogynistic mindset. One step at a time.”

For decades, storytelling has mythologised the male saviour — the lover who conquers, the father who provides, the son who redeems. But what filmmakers and screenwriters are showing us instead is the man who unlearns. The man who realises that vulnerability is not failure, that silence can be both armour and confession, that tenderness requires more courage than dominance ever did. Perhaps that is the quiet promise of this new cinema: that being a man no longer means being unreadable. That softness, once treated as shame, can finally take the shape of truth. Or as Kanu Behl said, “Each human being has a public persona, a private persona, and a secret persona. Words shape the public, attitudes shape the private. And silences have the power to unmask the secret.” 

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