Masaan Review: A Patient Varanasi Drama That Earns Its Sadness

Yes, Masaan is worth watching. Neeraj Ghaywan's debut feature, shot on the ghats of Varanasi, won the FIPRESCI Prize and the Prix de l'Avenir in Un Certain Regard at Cannes 2015, then the Indira Gandhi Award for Best Debut Film of a Director at the 63rd National Film Awards. At 109 minutes it is patient to a fault, and the patience is the point. Two lives run in parallel through the same city, both coming quietly apart.

Spoiler-free verdict: Watch it. A 109-minute Hindi drama with English subtitles, carried by Vicky Kaushal and Richa Chadda, photographed by Avinash Arun with a plainness you can feel. Rotten Tomatoes says 95 percent from 19 critic reviews. You need no plot summary before pressing play.

What Masaan is about

Two strands in Varanasi, a city the film treats as a character. Devi Pathak (Richa Chadda) teaches at a computer training centre, and she and her student Piyush are caught by the police during a consensual encounter. Inspector Mishra (Bhagwan Tiwari) keeps a video of Devi and uses it to extract a bribe from her father, Vidyadhar (Sanjay Mishra), a Sanskrit professor who runs a small bookshop.

The other strand runs through Deepak Kumar (Vicky Kaushal), a Dom-caste boy whose family works the cremation ghats where bodies burn on the bank of the Ganges. He studies civil engineering, falls for Shaalu (Shweta Tripathi), and tells her his caste and what his family does for a living. She says she will run away with him if her parents refuse the match.

Cast and performances

Kaushal plays Deepak in his first leading role, a young man who does the honest thing first and gets nothing for it. He had a minor role in Anurag Kashyap's Luv Shuv Tey Chicken Khurana (2012) before this. Screen Daily's Allan Hunter called it a "very engaging debut feature" and singled out Kaushal's "gauche charm" and Chadda, who "invests the long suffering Devi with a weary, unwavering determination to move forward." Sanjay Mishra, a veteran of the crumbling-patriarch role, plays a Sanskrit professor with a bookshop, and the role shrinks him. Tripathi plays Shaalu with so little hesitation that the film never has to explain her. She sets terms, and the script catches up to her.

What works

The camera. Avinash Arun photographs Banares without turning it into a postcard. Firstpost's Gayatri Gauri noticed the same thing: "Several crucial moments swirl around the Ganga, beautifully shot without succumbing to visual exotica, and after you leave the cinema, they linger in your memory, like the flames dying slowly in the cremation grounds where so much of Masaan unfurls." Screen Daily's Hunter credited the cinematographer with images that "convey the bustling spirit of the city from the brightly lit street markets to the flurry of sparks that dot the night sky from the funeral pyres." Those sparks are the film's signature, and the reason the ghats feel like work instead of wallpaper.

The music. Indian Ocean composed the songs and Varun Grover wrote the lyrics, an unusual pairing for a Hindi indie drama. The background score came from the French composer Bruno Coulais.

What doesn't

The script's reach. Varun Grover's screenplay tries to hold a police extortion story, a caste study, a love story and a father-daughter story at once. Variety's Jay Weissberg said the film never found "ways to overcome script and editing weaknesses, resulting in a disappointing drama," and called it "a heartfelt yet overambitious tale of class and gender inequality." That is the argument the film has with itself.

The middle. Jhonta, the boy in Vidyadhar's bookshop who dives for coins in the Ganges, is where Pathak's savings go, and the middle third lets the tension sag while the thread runs.

What audiences say

The Times of India's Meena Iyer gave it 4.0 out of 5 and headed her review "MASAAN HAS PASSION AND POIGNANCE IN EQUAL MEASURE," with TOI's own user panel also at 4.0 from 516 ratings. Letterboxd's member average sits at 4.1 from 33,988 ratings, across 5,468 written reviews. Rotten Tomatoes has the film at 95 percent from 19 critic reviews, filed under its alternate title Fly Away Solo. Shekhar Gupta wrote in Daily O: "You might say that my simplistic, impressionable non-filmy mind is blown away by watching Neeraj Ghaywan's brilliant, brilliant Masaan, which gets the pulse of small-town India as no other I have seen."

Where to watch Masaan

There is no subscription streaming for Masaan in the United States. JustWatch checked 374 streaming services on October 19, 2026 and lists it as a rental or a purchase on Amazon Video, with no free option anywhere, and TMDB's US watch providers agree. In India it streams on Amazon Prime Video. The film is subtitled Hindi, and JustWatch lists the US certificate as PG-13.

Current availability, cast details and member reviews sit on our Masaan streaming options and member reviews page.

Verdict

Is Masaan worth watching? Yes. It is a patient, carefully built film about what a society does to the people it has already decided about, and it earns the sadness at the end without a cheap shot at it. The middle runs long and the screenplay carries more than a first feature should, but Variety's Jay Weissberg left Cannes calling the result a disappointing drama. He was half right. What he missed was the ghats at night.

Spoiler warning: the ending of Masaan

Piyush does not survive the night the police take Devi and him, and the recording Mishra holds turns Vidyadhar's savings into the inspector's fee. Shaalu dies in a bus crash on the way back from a pilgrimage, and Deepak, working the ghat where she is brought, puts her ring in the Ganges.

Deepak graduates and takes an engineering job with the Indian Railways in Allahabad. Devi visits Piyush's grieving father and is violently turned away, then walks to the Ganges to immerse a gift Piyush had given her. Deepak, waiting at the same bank to leave for his new life, sees her crying and quietly offers her a bottle of water.

Then they get on a boat together. As a boatman calls out, they head for the Sangam at Allahabad and start talking. Two people who never met, in the same boat, moving downstream. Ghaywan lets the river carry them and trusts you to decide how to feel about it.