Best Indian Spy & Espionage Thrillers Ranked
Indian spy thrillers have come a long way from the Cold War intrigue of older Bollywood to today's globe-trotting, franchise-building espionage epics. The best Indian spy movies rank alongside the finest the genre has to offer anywhere — grounded in real geopolitical stakes, starring leads with genuine physical presence, and increasingly willing to explore the moral cost of intelligence work. Here are the 10 that define the genre.
| # | Film | Year | Agency | IMDb |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Raazi | 2018 | RAW | 7.8 |
| 2 | Baby | 2015 | RAW | 7.5 |
| 3 | Pathaan | 2023 | RAW/JOCR | 5.9 |
| 4 | Tiger Zinda Hai | 2017 | RAW | 6.0 |
| 5 | Ek Tha Tiger | 2012 | RAW | 6.7 |
| 6 | War | 2019 | RAW | 5.8 |
| 7 | Khufiya | 2023 | RAW | 6.2 |
| 8 | D-Day | 2013 | RAW | 7.5 |
| 9 | Special Ops | 2020 | RAW | 8.3 |
| 10 | Agent Sai Srinivasa Athreya | 2019 | CBI | 8.4 |
How we ranked these: Craft and intelligence of storytelling weighted over box office. A spy film earns its ranking by how well it understands tradecraft, moral ambiguity, and tension — not just how many explosions it delivers.
1. Raazi (2018)
Director: Meghna Gulzar | Lead: Alia Bhatt | Box Office: ₹194 crore | IMDb: 7.8
Raazi is the finest Indian spy film because it understands that espionage is not exciting — it is devastating. Sehmat Khan (Alia Bhatt) marries into a Pakistani military family to spy for India during the 1971 war. Every piece of intelligence she passes is a betrayal of people she genuinely loves. Meghna Gulzar never lets the audience forget the cost.
Based on Harinder Sikka's novel Calling Sehmat, the film is meticulous about tradecraft — dead drops, cipher codes, source management — while keeping the human drama at the centre. The ending refuses catharsis: there is no triumph, only survival and its aftermath. Raazi is the Indian spy film for people who think spy films are usually too easy on their heroes.
Watch it for: The only Indian spy film that treats its protagonist as a tragic figure rather than a triumphant one.
2. Baby (2015)
Director: Neeraj Pandey | Lead: Akshay Kumar | Box Office: ₹138 crore | IMDb: 7.5
Baby is India's closest equivalent to a serious procedural spy thriller — in the tradition of Munich or Zero Dark Thirty rather than James Bond. Akshay Kumar plays Ajay, a covert RAW operative tasked with eliminating a terror mastermind. Director Neeraj Pandey keeps the tone grimly functional: no glamour, no gadgets, just planning, surveillance, and the ugly reality of targeted operations.
Shot across Abu Dhabi, Nepal, and Turkey, Baby has genuine international production scale. The action sequences are filmed with unusual spatial coherence — you always know where everyone is and why it matters. Taapsee Pannu in an extended cameo as a female operative is the film's best performance. Baby established that Indian audiences would accept a spy thriller without comic relief or romantic subplot — a template Neeraj Pandey has returned to repeatedly.
Watch it for: The most grounded, procedurally honest Indian spy film outside of the OTT space.
3. Pathaan (2023)
Director: Siddharth Anand | Lead: Shah Rukh Khan | Box Office: ₹1,055 crore worldwide | IMDb: 5.9
Pathaan announced Shah Rukh Khan's return after four years away from screens, and the audience response was seismic — ₹1,055 crore worldwide, including ₹106 crore on opening day. SRK as the off-the-grid RAW agent Pathaan is sheer movie-star magic: charismatic, funny, and physically convincing in ways that surprised a generation of viewers who'd grown up with his romantic hero image.
The film is not interested in geopolitical complexity. It is interested in delivering maximum entertainment at maximum scale — Deepika Padukone, John Abraham, spectacular action sequences across Spain, Russia, and Afghanistan, and a cameo structure that launched the YRF Spy Universe as a genuine franchise proposition. The IMDb score reflects the gap between craft ambition and commercial ambition. As pure cinematic spectacle, Pathaan delivers completely on its terms.
Watch it for: Shah Rukh Khan reminding everyone why he is Shah Rukh Khan.
4. Tiger Zinda Hai (2017)
Director: Ali Abbas Zafar | Lead: Salman Khan | Box Office: ₹565 crore worldwide | IMDb: 6.0
Tiger Zinda Hai is the film that proved the YRF spy franchise could sustain Salman Khan's mass entertainer demands without losing action credibility. The premise — RAW agent Tiger (Salman Khan) and ISI agent Zoya (Katrina Kaif) team up to rescue nurses held hostage in Iraq — allowed for enormous action set pieces across Iraq and Austria, all staged with Hollywood-scale production values.
The action choreography, particularly the climactic hospital assault, is the finest of Salman's career. Ali Abbas Zafar works best as a pure action director, and Tiger Zinda Hai is his most controlled work. The film's box office — ₹565 crore — demonstrated that a patriotic spy action film centred on Salman Khan was among the safest commercial bets in Indian cinema.
Watch it for: The hospital action sequence — big-budget Indian action at its most technically assured.
5. Ek Tha Tiger (2012)
Director: Kabir Khan | Lead: Salman Khan | Box Office: ₹320 crore | IMDb: 6.7
The film that launched the YRF spy universe starts here. Ek Tha Tiger — RAW agent Tiger falls for an ISI agent in Dublin — is lighter in tone than its sequel, more interested in the romance than the espionage. But Kabir Khan's direction is fleet and confident, and the central conceit (enemy spies who fall in love across the line of control) is emotionally resonant in a way that the franchise has struggled to recapture.
Salman Khan and Katrina Kaif have genuine screen chemistry, and the film uses it wisely — the spy plot is scaffolding for a romance between two people who know their love has no institutional home. At ₹320 crore in 2012, it was the highest-grossing Indian film of its year, and it set the franchise template that Pathaan, Tiger 3, and Alpha have since elaborated.
Watch it for: The cleanest, most emotionally coherent entry in the YRF spy universe.
6. War (2019)
Director: Siddharth Anand | Leads: Hrithik Roshan, Tiger Shroff | Box Office: ₹475 crore worldwide | IMDb: 5.8
War is a film about two of Indian cinema's finest physical performers chasing each other across five countries. Hrithik Roshan and Tiger Shroff as mentor and rogue protégé in the YRF spy universe deliver action sequences of genuinely eye-popping technical quality — the motorcycle chase in Morocco, the aerial sequence, the climactic fight on a moving train. Siddharth Anand directs pure kinetic cinema.
The plot is secondary to the spectacle, and the film knows it. War earned ₹475 crore by delivering exactly what it promised: India's two finest action stars in a big-budget showdown. As franchise positioning it was essential — it established Siddharth Anand as the go-to director for YRF's most commercial spy outings, setting up Pathaan and eventually King.
Watch it for: Hrithik Roshan and Tiger Shroff making action look physically effortless in ways no other Indian actors can.
7. Khufiya (2023)
Director: Vishal Bhardwaj | Lead: Tabu | Platform: Netflix | IMDb: 6.2
Khufiya is Vishal Bhardwaj's adaptation of Amar Bhushan's novel Escape to Nowhere — a RAW officer (Tabu) who falls in love with the man she's been assigned to surveill. Bhardwaj brings his characteristic literary sensibility to spy material that most directors would treat as action-first: here the tradecraft is subordinate to the moral and emotional consequences of intelligence work.
Tabu, as always, is exceptional — she navigates Krishna's professional competence and personal vulnerability with the kind of subtle performance that Indian spy thrillers rarely ask of their leads. The Delhi milieu — bureaucratic corridors, safe houses, middle-class drawing rooms — is rendered with documentary authenticity. Khufiya is a spy film for viewers who find the human cost more interesting than the action.
Watch it for: Tabu's performance — a spy film carried entirely by psychological interiority rather than physical spectacle.
8. D-Day (2013)
Director: Nikkhil Advani | Leads: Irrfan Khan, Rishi Kapoor | Box Office: ₹30 crore | IMDb: 7.5
D-Day is the most underrated Indian spy film. A fictionalised account of a RAW operation to capture a Dawood Ibrahim-like fugitive in Karachi, it stars Irrfan Khan as the field operative leading a team into enemy territory. The Karachi sequences, shot in Gujarat with remarkable production design, have the texture of genuine surveillance footage.
Rishi Kapoor's villain — a crime boss who has bought enough of both countries that neither can touch him — is one of the finest antagonist performances in Hindi thriller history. D-Day is meticulous about operational detail, morally sophisticated about India-Pakistan geopolitics, and carried by Irrfan Khan at his most quietly commanding. It flopped commercially and has been largely forgotten. It deserves urgent rediscovery.
Watch it for: Irrfan Khan proving that Indian spy cinema doesn't need superpowers — just intelligence and nerve.
→ Explore D-Day on GudVibe
9. Special Ops (OTT Series, 2020)
Director: Neeraj Pandey | Lead: Kay Kay Menon | Platform: JioHotstar | IMDb: 8.3
Special Ops is the finest Indian spy series — a taut, meticulously plotted RAW procedural in which Himmat Singh (Kay Kay Menon) spends 19 years tracking the ghost he believes was behind the 2001 Parliament attack. Spanning five countries and using non-linear structure to build sustained tension, it's the Indian equivalent of 24 — minus the real-time gimmick, plus far more geopolitical credibility.
Neeraj Pandey — who directed Baby — brings the same functional, unglamorous approach to long-form television. The intelligence operations feel real. The bureaucratic battles feel real. Kay Kay Menon's Himmat Singh is one of Indian TV's great characters: obsessive, brilliant, and willing to sacrifice everything on a hunch he can't prove. Special Ops 1.5 (prequel) and Season 2 followed, each maintaining quality.
Watch it for: The most procedurally intelligent Indian spy narrative in any format — film or television.
→ Explore Special Ops on GudVibe
10. Agent Sai Srinivasa Athreya (2019)
Director: Swaroop RSJ | Lead: Naveen Polishetty | Language: Telugu | IMDb: 8.4
The most unexpected entry on this list. Agent Sai Srinivasa Athreya is a Telugu comedy-mystery in which an aspiring private detective in small-town Andhra Pradesh stumbles into a murder case that proves far larger than he expected. Naveen Polishetty's Sai Srinivasa is bumbling, loveable, and unexpectedly competent — a tribute to every amateur sleuth in detective fiction.
What earns this film its 8.4 IMDb rating is the writing: genuinely clever plotting, jokes that emerge from character rather than situation, and a willingness to take its low-budget mystery seriously. It's not a spy film in the traditional sense — but in its intelligence and its delight in tradecraft at a human scale, it belongs on any list of the best Indian espionage entertainment. A reminder that the genre can be joyful as well as grim.
Watch it for: The funniest and most inventive take on Indian detective fiction in recent memory.
The Verdict
Indian spy cinema spans an extraordinary range — from Raazi's quiet devastation to Pathaan's blockbuster spectacle, from D-Day's gritty realism to Agent Sai Srinivasa's delightful comedy. The YRF Spy Universe is India's most commercially successful franchise. But the genre's most artistically significant entries are the smaller, smarter films that take intelligence work seriously as a subject rather than just a backdrop.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the best Indian spy movie?
Raazi (2018) is the critical consensus pick — a spy thriller built on moral complexity rather than action spectacle. For pure entertainment, Pathaan (2023) is the biggest and most enjoyable franchise entry. Baby (2015) is the most procedurally grounded. All three offer distinct versions of what Indian spy cinema can be.
Is there an Indian version of James Bond?
The YRF Spy Universe (Tiger, Pathaan, War, Alpha) is India's closest equivalent — a connected franchise of spy action films sharing characters across multiple movies. Salman Khan's Tiger and Shah Rukh Khan's Pathaan are its marquee characters, with Hrithik Roshan's Kabir from War completing the core ensemble.
Which Indian spy films are based on true events?
Raazi is based on Harinder Sikka's novel about a real RAW operative in the 1971 war. Baby is inspired by real covert operations. D-Day is fictionalised from Operation X, the actual RAW plan to capture Dawood Ibrahim in Karachi. Special Ops draws from multiple real intelligence operations.
