There is a certain bait-and-switch at the heart of Lust Stories. It invokes the language of desire only to lead us elsewhere. To read it as a straightforward collection on lust would be to miss the mischievous intelligence of its premise. Lust here is less an end than an aperture. It is a breach through which more elusive hungers come into view. Lust Stories 3, the latest instalment in Netflix’s anthology, brings together its most intriguing quartet of filmmakers since the original 2018 collection. Each approaches lust through a distinct vantage point. Not all of them work equally well, but each finds, within desire, something worth examining.

Vikramaditya Motwane’s opening short is rather forgettable were it not for the formidable two-hander at its centre. Radhika Apte and Konkona Sen Sharma play best friends Padma and Shonali, women in their 40s, both caught in marriages that have long since been rendered sexless. On the surface, this is a story about partner-swapping. But Motwane is probing middle-class morality, how its prescriptions around marriage, propriety and desirability can slowly erode one’s sense of self. This subtext is spelled out in a laboured bathtub conversation. But there is some pleasure in watching Apte and Sharma inhabit women who, after years of making themselves legible to everyone else, begin to rediscover the possibility of being legible to themselves.

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The anthology’s most accomplished short comes from Kiran Rao, who turns away from bodily desire to make Mumbai itself the object of longing. Here, the lust for an imagined life outlasts sexual desire. It is also the most playful of the four, refusing the solemnity that often accompanies stories about desire. There is a gentleness to the way Rao observes the city, even as she recognises its economy of exchange. In a place where everything seems to operate as a zero-sum equation, even lust acquires a transactional character. You may give something to the body, but it cannot satisfy every hunger. The film circles back to this idea in its opening image: Sparks fly between a pizza delivery boy (Gurfateh Pirzada) and a nail-salon worker (Sana Thampi), only for crow shit to fall on him from nowhere. That, perhaps, is Mumbai: Where the unexpected is always descending upon you, blessing one life and bruising another.

Shakun Batra’s short is perhaps the anthology’s most intellectual and sensually assured, even if it eventually becomes captive to its own conceit. A divorcing couple, Varun (Ali Fazal) and Sailee (Radhikka Madan), forced into a court-mandated cooling-off period, can barely tolerate each other, yet cannot resist each other either. Batra uses their physical intimacy to ask what happens when conversation fails and sex becomes the only language. There is also an undercurrent of power: Only in these moments does Sailee appear to reclaim the control otherwise denied to her within the relationship. Their lust is therefore both refuge and elegy, a temporary peace that mourns the relationship they are trying to leave behind.

Set in Hyderabad in 1987, Vishal Bhardwaj’s outing is the most inventive, even if it occasionally feels overcooked. Saira (Aditi Rao Hydari) and Badru (Siddhant) are happily married, except that she finds herself sexually unfulfilled. A teaching assistant at a women’s college, Saira teaches Manto and Ismat Chughtai, and gradually channels her desire into language, asking what happens when longing finds expression through writing, and literature. Where Saira experiments with the language of the written word, Bhardwaj responds in the language of cinema, with both arriving at perhaps the anthology’s most elemental preoccupation: The desire to be seen.

Arif is a Mumbai-based screenwriter and researcher