We don’t often get to write sentences like this: a Hindi-language Netflix film has a queer woman at its centre. Not as a side character. Not as a tragedy. As the lead – a brilliant, complicated, flawed surgeon navigating power, desire, and the particular hell of being a successful woman that people suddenly can’t wait to tear down. That alone made Accused, released on Netflix on 27 February, worth putting on your radar. Whether it’s worth your full attention is a slightly different conversation.
Accused follows Dr. Geetika Sen (Konkona Sen Sharma), a high-flying gynaecologist living in London with her wife, Dr. Meera (Pratibha Ranta). Geetika is the kind of woman who walks through hospital corridors like she owns them – sharp, ambitious, and not particularly interested in making herself smaller for anyone. Then an anonymous email lands in HR, accusing her of sexually harassing a patient. From there, her career, her reputation, and her marriage start to unravel.
The gender flip here is deliberate and genuinely interesting. Think Tár, but Bollywood. A powerful woman cast as the potential predator rather than the victim forces you to sit with your own assumptions – and the film knows it. It’s at its best in the early scenes, where director Anubhuti Kashyap lets the ambiguity breathe; you genuinely can’t tell what Geetika is capable of, and the tension between her and Meera is electric.
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As for the honest verdict: critics are split, and we’re not going to pretend otherwise. Accused currently holds a 30% on Rotten Tomatoes and a 4.4 on IMDb – numbers that tell their own story. Scroll.in described it as “an initially sharp, clear-eyed exploration” that ultimately “signals a loss of nerve,” while reviewers at Hollywood Reporter India felt the film was “content to only introduce a thorny topic” without fully committing to it. The final act, by most accounts, trades its complexity for a neater, more conventional thriller resolution – which is a shame, because the first half earns something better.
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What almost everyone agrees on, though, is the performances. Konkona Sen Sharma is doing work that makes you forget you’re watching a film, and Pratibha Ranta – who you might remember from Laapataa Ladies – more than holds her own. If the script occasionally lets them down, they don’t let the script down.
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There’s also the elephant in the room that’s worth naming: Bollywood has a long history of sidelining or sanitising queer stories, and even here, some viewers have pointed out that the intimacy between Geetika and Meera feels muted in a way it probably wouldn’t if they were a straight couple. It’s a fair criticism. Representation that keeps its distance is still representation doing half a job.
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Final Thoughts
Accused is imperfect, sometimes frustrating, and probably not the queer Bollywood thriller we deserved. But it exists, it has a lesbian lead played by one of India’s finest actors, and it’s sitting right there on Netflix (UK & USA). Watch it for the performances, watch it for the first hour, watch it because a Hindi film centring a queer woman’s story is still – in 2026 – a huge deal, however messy the execution. Just maybe don’t go in expecting Tár.
Nonchalant x
This article was written by one of our creative team writers here at Nonchalant Magazine.
