There’s a moment in Varun Grover’s directorial debut short film, KISS, that feels like the entire country is holding its breath. On screen, two men kiss. It’s tender, soft, and sincere. But in the shadowy stillness of an old cinema hall, three people watching that kiss each see something different. One claims it lasted 28 seconds. Another insists it stretched to 2 minutes and 25 seconds. The third believes it lasted over three minutes. Time bends. Memory fails. Reality cracks open.
That is the genius of KISS—a film that opens with a fleeting but loaded moment and spirals into a surreal dissection of fear, intimacy, and control. Grover, a writer known for cutting truths and lyrical empathy, doesn’t use science fiction as a visual spectacle. He uses it as an interrogation device. What begins as a censorship screening quickly becomes a warped mirror, where perception is distorted, not by trickery, but by prejudice. And at the center of this storm is a kiss—one that the system is intent on erasing. The film follows a young filmmaker named Sam, played by Adarsh Gourav, who nervously screens his new film for two CBFC examiners. The scene under review, a same-sex kiss, becomes the turning point for what follows.
Played with remarkable restraint by Swanand Kirkire and Shubhrajyoti Barat, the censor board authority figures embody two different but deeply familiar Indian archetypes: one cloaked in bureaucratic formality, the other in traditionalist suspicion. Their discomfort is piercing, but Grover does not reduce them to caricatures. Instead, he lingers on their faces. He lets them flinch. He lets them explain. Then he lets them unravel.
It’s this unraveling that gives KISS its sci-fi edge. As the characters debate the kiss, the theater starts to bend the rules of reality. Lights flicker. Sound glitches. Time loses consistency. The same footage plays again, slightly altered. What they are watching starts to watch them back. And through it all, the kiss loops on screen like a ghost—not provocative, not erotic, simply present. And that presence turns agonizing.
The power of KISS lies in what it refuses to say aloud. The queerness of the characters in the film-within-the-film is never labeled, nor justified. Their intimacy is not explained, defended, or dramatized. It simply is. And that’s the most radical act of all. In a landscape where queerness is still often treated as an issue rather than an identity, where gay love is permitted only under the pretense of comedy or tragedy or tokenism, KISS quietly insists on its ordinariness. It does not beg for empathy. It demands equality.
Grover’s script, written with sharpness and clarity, turns a 28-second kiss into a philosophical battleground. It seems to ask: is it really the kiss that’s being censored, or is it the censors’ own unease they’re trying to silence? In interviews, Grover has pointed to real-life absurdities as inspiration. One story in particular stuck with him—a case where the CBFC instructed filmmakers to reduce a kiss from 22 seconds to 11. The sheer specificity of that demand fascinated him. Who sits with a stopwatch and decides that 11 seconds of affection is tolerable, but 12 is not? And more importantly, what is such nitpicky control actually protecting us from?
In KISS, the answer is as unsettling as it is inevitable. It’s not the kiss they fear, but the mirror it holds up to the nation. The discomfort isn’t with the act but rather what it represents—a disruption of hierarchy, a challenge to heteronormative conformity, and a refusal to remain invisible. Grover smartly layers this discomfort with empathy. As the film progresses, it doesn’t harshly expose the censors—it gradually peels back their defences. Their rigidity is rooted in personal history. Their revulsion is traced to deeper wounds. One of them, we learn, may be repressing desires of his own. The other, haunted by childhood trauma, clings to moral codes like armor.
Rather than vilifying these characters, Grover lets them grieve. It’s what makes KISS more than satire. It’s a study of how shame moves through generations. How authority can mask fragility. And how censorship is so often a projection of unresolved fear.
Technically, the film is tight, sparse, and deliberate. The production design turns the single-screen cinema into a space that feels suspended in time—polished floors, untouched seats, shadows that feel just a little too stark. The cinematography by Vineet Singh Chendil is clean and observational, while Atanu Mukherjee’s editing refuses to let the viewer relax. Every pause feels like a held breath. Every loop, a memory stuttering. The score is almost imperceptible. Instead, Grover trusts silence—the kind that exists between people too afraid to admit what they feel.
That silence makes the climax land harder without fully giving it away. The kiss is finally shown. Not just discussed or measured, but witnessed. It arrives like an act of reclamation. In that moment, the audience becomes the fourth viewer in the room. You are no longer outside the story. You are inside the decision. How long did it last for you? And why did it feel like too much?
In the wider context of Indian cinema, KISS marks a distinct turn. Queer love has long been a contested presence on our screens. From Fire in the 90s to Aligarh in the 2010s, the battle has been fought film by film, scene by scene. Even in recent years, mainstream depictions have come with caveats—softened, sanitized, or framed in comedy. Intimacy, particularly physical intimacy between queer characters, is still policed, whether by the CBFC or by public sentiment. Grover doesn’t argue against this with statistics or speeches. He argues with a story. A story that lasts seventeen minutes and feels like an entire reckoning.
KISS echoes other speculative works that use surrealism to interrogate truth. At times, it feels like an Indian cousin to Charlie Kaufman’s theater-of-the-mind narratives or a quieter episode of Black Mirror. But it is rooted deeply in our soil, our politics, our contradictions. The ghosts here are not digital. They are cultural. The distortion of time is not technological. It is psychological.
And that is what makes KISS so devastatingly effective. It does not fight censorship with noise. It disarms it with quiet precision. It does not shout queer liberation. It whispers it, over and over, until it cannot be unheard. And in doing so, it reminds us that sometimes, a kiss is not just a kiss. Sometimes, it is a story of who gets to see, who gets to feel, and who gets to decide how long is too long.