Lust Stories 3 Trailer Out, Netflix Sets September 18 Date

Four directors and a ten-actor ensemble return for another round of anthology stories about desire, with Vikramaditya Motwane, Kiran Rao, Shakun Batra and Vishal Bhardwaj each helming a segment.

Netflix dropped the trailer for Lust Stories 3 on Tuesday, and the anthology is sticking to its formula: four directors, four unconnected stories, one shared theme of desire making a mess of ordinary lives. The show streams from September 18.

This time the chairs belong to Vikramaditya Motwane, Kiran Rao, Shakun Batra and Vishal Bhardwaj, each directing a segment that runs on its own tone and its own logic. The cast list is stacked. Radhika Apte, Konkona Sen Sharma, Aditi Rao Hydari, Radhika Madan, Sana Thampi, Vijay Varma, Abhishek Banerjee, Siddharth, Ali Fazal and Gurfateh Pirzada are all in the mix, spread across the four stories rather than sharing a single ensemble frame.

From the trailer, expect the usual Lust Stories cocktail: comedy that turns awkward fast, a few scenes that sit somewhere between tender and uncomfortable, and characters making decisions they can't quite explain to themselves. Netflix is billing it as an exploration of what people want, what they don't say out loud, and how those two things collide.

Each director has offered a line on what drew them in, and the pitches are, unsurprisingly, all about the space between comfort and disruption. Motwane says his story explores what happens when everyday life starts rubbing up against the pull of something unexpected, calling the shoot with this cast and crew an incredible experience. Rao describes her segment as tracking how an early spark of attraction turns complicated fast, and says the anthology format gave her room to play with intimacy and humour without losing either.

Batra's pitch leans into ambiguity, people who don't know what they're feeling and don't pretend to have an answer for it, which he says is where both the drama and the comedy in his story come from. Bhardwaj, closing out the directors' round of quotes, frames his segment around a character finding her own voice and what happens once that voice travels further than she expected, tying it to questions of identity and who gets to tell stories about wanting something.

The first two Lust Stories instalments picked up an International Emmy nomination for the anthology, which is doing a lot of the lifting in how Netflix is positioning this one, four filmmakers with distinct sensibilities rather than a single show trying to hold one tone across two hours. Whether the segments cohere as a whole or work better as four separate short films is the usual anthology gamble, and it's one this franchise has taken twice before with reasonably steady returns.

What's different this time is the size of the cast doing the navigating. Ten credited actors across four stories means less room for any single performer to carry a segment the way Kiara Advani or Manisha Koirala once did in earlier volumes. That's either going to sharpen the anthology's range or spread it thin, and September 18 will settle which.

Netflix hasn't said whether all four segments run to equal length, or which director's story opens the anthology. Those details, along with reviews once the show actually streams, are the next things to watch for.