Darlings, an upcoming dark comedy starring Alia Bhatt and her maiden outing as a producer, has launched its first teaser trailer on Netflix. Even though Red Chillies Entertainment co-produced Darlings, Shah Rukh Khan’s Red Chillies remained uncredited. Throughout the one-and-a-half-minute teaser, Alia Bhatt’s character’s eerie monologue plays in the background. As the video progresses, she tells the audience that individuals will always return to their actual selves, even if it is against their own best interests. In other words, the tendency of bad people to injure others even if doing so would cause them to suffer.
To begin, we see Bhatt’s character alone herself at a movie theatre, as though she’s been stood up. Her lover, played by Vijay Varma, emerges to greet her outside the theatre later. Despite his best efforts, she remains unmoved by his attempts at apologies. After observing another man (Roshan Mathew) loitering about her, he becomes noticeably anxious. When he spots a single strand of hair on the man’s shoulder, his suspicions are heightened. Next, we see Bhatt’s character and her mother at a police station, where they are being interrogated about a crime (played by Shefali Shah).
There are scenes in which Varma’s character returns to his house after a long day at work, presumably shocked, and Bhatt’s character dresses up as some type of femme fatale in front of a mirror before answering the policeman’s question. In the police station, she explains to the officer that they merely murdered the person—we still don’t know who—in their mind. It was in filmmaker Zoya Akhtar’s rap drama Gully Boy, India’s official bid for the 2019 Oscars, that Bhatt previously collaborated with Varma, one of Hindi cinema’s brightest emerging talents.
At this year’s Berlin International Film Festival, she appeared in Gangubai Kathaawadi, which went on to become an international smash, and RRR, a Telugu blockbuster that has become a hit in the United States as well. Ranbir Kapoor will be her co-star in Brahmastra, a high-budget fantasy film. For Mathew, Darlings is his second Netflix project, following Ghost Stories and Choked. More than two decades after his on-screen debut in Mira Nair’s Golden Lion-winning movie Monsoon Wedding, Shah has had a comeback on Netflix’s International Emmy-winning series Delhi Crime. Jasmeet K. Reen directs the Netflix original film Darlings, which will premiere on the streaming service on August 5th.