New Regional OTT Releases: 5 Must-Watch Gujarati, Tamil, Malayalam and Hindi Films

Five new films have landed across ShemarooMe, Prime Video, SonyLIV and ZEE5, giving viewers a richly varied weekend watchlist that doubles as a small map of how regional cinema is negotiating identity, faith and modern relationships through distinct narrative grammars. For audiences who follow the pulse of Indian streaming, the lineup is less about quantity than about the thematic spread across genres.

Spiritual Reckoning and Supernatural Inheritance

Two of the five releases lean heavily into the metaphysical, and they form the genre-defining backbone of the week. The Gujarati film Laalo – Krishna Sada Sahaayate, streaming on ShemarooMe and directed by Ankit Sakhiya, reportedly emerged as the highest-grossing Gujarati film in recent memory, which gives its digital arrival a certain cultural weight. The narrative traces a struggling rickshaw driver mysteriously trapped inside an isolated farmhouse, where recurring visions of Lord Krishna become the vehicle through which he confronts buried guilt and painful memories. What begins as a haunting premise matures into a study of redemption—Sakhiya appears to use silence, space and isolation as a visual grammar of spiritual reckoning rather than overt spectacle, a choice that lets the character's interior life drive the pacing.

The Malayalam offering Aroopi, on Prime Video, trades the divine for the demonic but operates in a similarly thematic register. Directed by Abhilash Warrier and featuring Vysakh Ravi, Neha Chawla and Joy Mathew, the film weaves Kerala folklore with family curse mythology. A vengeful spirit released from a doll becomes the catalyst for Niranjan, the last surviving heir, to return to his ancestral home following a brutal murder, and as ancient secrets resurface, Warrier uses the supernatural framework to probe inheritance, memory and the weight of lineage—a familiar Malayalam thriller mode, but one that consistently delivers character-driven tension rather than jump-cut reliance.

Romance, Comedy and Cultural Negotiation

For lighter fare, Tamil cinema offers two distinct takes on contemporary relationships, each testing the romantic form in its own way. Heartin, on Prime Video, is a romantic comedy-drama anchored by Sananth, Madonna Sebastian and Emaya T, built around the evergreen complication of an ex-girlfriend re-entering the picture. The film's pacing reportedly leans into awkward humour and emotional confusion, treating the past's return not as melodrama but as a study in indecision—an approach that gives the character arcs room to breathe rather than rush toward resolution.

Anbe Diana, streaming on SonyLIV, pushes the romantic premise further into cross-cultural territory. Set in the Perambur neighbourhood, the story follows a conservative Telugu boy and an Anglo-Indian girl whose relationship collides with family traditions, long-standing rivalries and prejudice. Cultural specificity here is the film's structural engine—each scene appears calibrated to reveal new fault lines in the couple's families, and the comedy seems to grow organically from those tensions rather than from set-piece gags. It is the kind of regional specificity that broadens the streaming audience without flattening its local texture.

What to Queue Up

Rounding out the slate is Bharat Bhhagya Viddhaata, a Hindi medical drama on ZEE5, which adds a genre entirely missing from the rest of the lineup and gives the week a grounded, procedural counterweight. Taken together, these five titles suggest a curated weekend where viewers can move from spiritual reckoning to supernatural dread to relational comedy within a single streaming session—hardly a typical Friday, and one worth planning around. GQ India's separate Friday roundup, meanwhile, flags seven more titles arriving on August 21 across Netflix, ZEE5 and SonyLIV, for viewers who want to go deeper still.