Before Hindi cinema learned to package rebellion as a marketing strategy, Love Sex aur Dhokha walked in like an accident. Uninvited. Unfiltered. Impossible to look away from. Released in 2010, LSD did not ask for attention. It demanded it by refusing to behave like a “film” at all.
Directed by Dibakar Banerjee, LSD was not interested in stars, glamour, or moral closure. It was interested in truth. The kind that feels invasive. The kind that makes you uncomfortable because it looks too much like real life.B
The Camera Was the Villain, Not the Characters
What made LSD radical was not its subject matter. Bollywood had explored love, sex, and betrayal before. What it had not done was expose how technology watches us commit all three.
Each story in LSD is told through a device. A hidden camera. A CCTV feed. A sting operation. The framing is intentional. The characters are not being observed by the audience alone. They are being surveilled by systems they trust.
The film quietly suggests that the real antagonist is not desire or betrayal. It is visibility. Once everything is recorded, nothing is innocent anymore.
Love as Performance, Not Romance
The first segment strips love of poetry. A young couple runs away to get married, believing their love story deserves celebration. What they do not realise is that their most private moments are being recorded for profit.
This is not romance. It is exploitation disguised as documentation. The camera does not look away. Neither does the audience. And that is the point. LSD makes you complicit. You are watching something you know you should not be watching.
Long before social media monetised intimacy, LSD predicted it.
Sex Without Fantasy, Only Power
The second segment is the most unsettling because it refuses stylisation. A casting couch encounter is shown without eroticism. Without drama. Just power, fear, and silence.
There is no background score guiding your emotions. No cinematic distance. The rawness feels invasive because it mirrors reality too closely. This is not about lust. It is about entitlement.
Bollywood rarely portrays sexual exploitation without melodrama. LSD strips it of spectacle. What remains is uncomfortable, ugly, and honest.
Dhokha as Public Entertainment
The final segment turns betrayal into content. A sting operation captures a young man’s infidelity and broadcasts it as moral justice. Except justice is not the goal. Spectacle is.
Here, LSD exposes society’s hypocrisy. We condemn wrongdoing while enjoying its exposure. We shame publicly while consuming privately. The line between accountability and humiliation disappears.
The film does not offer redemption. It offers reflection.
Why LSD Felt Dangerous
LSD was shot on digital cameras at a time when Bollywood still worshipped polish. Its actors were unknown. Its settings were ordinary. That ordinariness is what made it terrifying.
This could be anyone. This could be you.
The film arrived before Instagram, before influencer culture, before viral outrage cycles. Yet it understood something essential. Once life becomes content, humanity becomes collateral damage.
A Film That Trusted Its Audience Too Much
LSD does not moralise. It does not comfort. It does not resolve. It trusts the audience to sit with discomfort and draw their own conclusions.
That trust feels almost radical now. Contemporary Hindi cinema prefers safety. Clear heroes. Clear villains. Clean messaging. LSD refused all of it.
It was not interested in approval. It was interested in exposure.
Why Bollywood Doesn’t Make Films Like LSD Anymore
Today, rebellion is curated. Controversy is algorithm friendly. Films pretend to be bold while remaining emotionally hollow. LSD came from a time when filmmakers were still willing to unsettle rather than trend.
It did not launch stars. It launched conversations. Conversations about consent, surveillance, morality, and voyeurism. Conversations we are still having, only louder and less honestly.
LSD Was a Warning We Ignored
In hindsight, LSD feels prophetic. It warned us about a world where privacy dissolves, intimacy is recorded, and morality becomes content.
It was never meant to entertain comfortably. It was meant to disturb thoughtfully.
And maybe that is why it still lingers. Because LSD was not just ahead of its time.
It was telling us exactly where we were headed.