Every month, almost without fail, I find myself doing what I imagine most people do when the evening has gone on long enough and the brain has stopped demanding anything particularly ambitious from it: I open Netflix, scroll through the rows of thumbnails, choose something I can imagine watching in bed, and accept that there is a very real possibility I will fall asleep halfway through.

This month, that film was Best of the Best, the new Maitreyi Ramakrishnan-led dance film, which I put on expecting nothing more complicated than two hours of comfortable Netflix cinema. And, to my slight surprise, I ended up rather liking it. It is hardly the kind of film that will have people standing outside cinemas debating its contribution to the history of the medium, but that was never really the appeal. Best of the Best understands the peculiar pleasure of being a Netflix film you can sink into without having to earn the experience first. I am hardly the film’s intended audience, but having grown up with Bollywood playing from breakfast through dinner, I was never going to sit quietly through those songs. The humming started almost involuntarily.

So when I started Best of the Best on Netflix, I expected the usual dance-film machinery. College. Rivalry. A big stage. Someone falling out with their best friend before eventually finding their way back. And yes, Lena Khan’s film gives you all of that. What surprised me was how much I kept thinking about the friendship after the dancing was over.

The Dance Competition Is Almost a Distraction

Maya and Anjali have been best friends since childhood and arrive at UCLA with a relationship that already feels lived-in. Maya is blunt and ambitious. Anjali is more interested in being liked and reassured. They are different in ways that initially make them work. Then they join UCLA Agni, a competitive Bollywood-fusion dance team, and suddenly the friendship acquires a scoreboard.

The problem begins when Anjali is chosen over Maya as the female lead for an upcoming national competition. Maya knows she wanted the role. Anjali knows she has been given it. Neither quite knows what to do with the fact that the other person is hurt. The film understands something painfully familiar here. Growing up often means discovering that the person who has known you longest cannot necessarily follow you into every version of yourself. That is where Best of the Best became more interesting to me than its formula suggested.

I Liked These Girls More Than I Liked the Competition

Maitreyi Ramakrishnan and Priyanka Kedia are the reason the film works when it does. Their chemistry gives Maya and Anjali the feeling of people who have accumulated years of private jokes and old grievances without needing to explain any of them. There is a lovely early device in which the film shows their childhood through opening-credit footage. By the time the competition starts causing trouble, you already understand that this is not simply two dancers competing for the same role. They are trying to work out whether their friendship can survive the fact that they are becoming different people.

I found myself caring much more about that than I cared about who would win the championship. The romances are there, but they mostly sit around the edges. Maya has chemistry with Arjun, while Anjali develops a crush on Ronak. The film is more convincing when it lets the girls be interested in each other’s lives rather than making every emotional problem about a boy.

Bollywood Enters the Chat

What I particularly liked is that the film does not spend its entire running time explaining South Asian identity to itself. Maya and Anjali are South Asian American women. They know Bollywood. They dance to Indian music. They exist comfortably within American life. The film does not turn every cultural reference into a lesson about immigration or lost traditions. Scroll describes it as a film that celebrates its connection to India while remaining firmly American in its look and spirit, and I think that tension is one of its most appealing qualities. The soundtrack helps. Indian songs sit alongside American music, with Ghungroo, Enjoy Enjaami and an original A.R. Rahman song, Aamaasee, becoming part of the film’s musical world. Bollywood is present without being treated as an exotic object that needs translating. For once, the characters are allowed to simply enjoy it.

But Why Is the Dancing So Forgettable?

This is where my affection for the film gets complicated. A film about competitive dance should leave you wanting to replay its biggest performance. Best of the Best does not quite manage that. Scroll and RogerEbert.com 🔗 arrive at the same uneasy conclusion: the choreography is often weakened by the way the performances are filmed and edited. The camera keeps cutting rather than allowing the viewer to properly experience the movement. Abstract AF makes a similar observation, noting that the final dance does not leave the kind of visual memory that a great dance sequence should. That is frustrating because the cast can clearly dance. Still, I kept forgiving the film.

A More Honest Centre

I think I went into Best of the Best wanting the dance sequences to be the thing I remembered. Instead, it was the friendship.

There is something oddly moving about watching two people who have known each other since childhood realise that love does not automatically make growing up easy. Maya wants to be recognised for what she can do. Anjali wants to feel wanted. Neither desire is particularly unreasonable, but put them in the same room, and suddenly someone gets hurt, which felt more honest to me than the competition itself.

The film is imperfect (just as anything designed to keep Netflix’s binge-hungry audience fed inevitably must be). Its dance sequences deserved more space. Some of its plot beats arrive exactly where you expect them to. Yet I think that is also why I liked it. Beneath the Netflix sheen and the Bollywood-fusion premise, Best of the Best is really interested in the strange grief of becoming a person your oldest friend does not completely recognise anymore.

And maybe that is why the final competition never became the part I cared about most. I started the film expecting to watch two girls try to become the best dancers in the room. What stayed with me was the much harder question underneath it: what happens when the person you grew up with is no longer growing in the same direction as you?

That is a competition with no trophy at the end.