Euphoria Creator Sam Levinson Is Sandeep Reddy Vanga For The West

(TW: This article contains discussions of sexual violence and the sexualisation of women)

There's a strange, almost predictable rhythm to certain kinds of "controversial" cinema now. A filmmaker puts a woman through something extreme: humiliation, violence, sexual spectacle, frames it as "raw" or "honest," and waits. 

The backlash comes. Think-pieces erupt. Social media fractures. And then, almost inevitably, the creator steps in, not to clarify, but to double down.

Because the outrage was never collateral damage, it was the point.

In two different corners of the industry, Sam Levinson and Sandeep Reddy Vanga have mastered this cycle with unnerving precision. Their work orchestrates provocation, using women's bodies, pain, and sexuality as its primary instruments. 

And in doing so, they've arrived at a similar destination: a cinematic language where degradation is aesthetic, misogyny is defensible, and criticism is treated as a confirmation that the bait worked.

Degradation Of Women Is Aesthetic In Sam Levinson And Sandeep Reddy Vanga's Dictionary

What links Sam Levinson's shows with Sandeep Reddy Vanga's films is not just controversy, it's a fixation. A fixation on women as sites of suffering, submission, and as "objects".

In Euphoria's latest season, the imagery is not merely explicit, it is aggressively grotesque. Women gagging on "lubed-up balls of fentanyl," choking, dribbling, and nearly vomiting. 

Later, those same bodies are reduced further, defecating the drugs into colanders, failing to make it in time, s**t trickling down their legs, followed by a dog licking it off. It's not narrative necessity. It's an indulgence (in Sam Levinson's vocabulary).

The degradation continues: a woman collapses in an airport as a fentanyl balloon bursts inside her, her death followed by a clinical shot of the remaining drug pellets being cleaned of her blood. Another young woman chokes on bile on a bathroom floor. 

A still from Euphoria Season 3.

Across the world, Vanga's Animal offers its own brand of brutality. A woman is forced to lick a man's shoe "to prove loyalty." Another is threatened at gunpoint while pregnant. A wife is slapped. A lover is manipulated with lines like, "You have a big pelvis, you will accommodate healthy babies." Here, violence is central, repeated, and normalised.

A still from Animal.

Both creators seem less interested in women as people and more as canvases on which humiliation, violence, and control can be vividly painted.

Sexualisation Without Interior Life

If degradation is one axis, sexualisation is the other, and it is relentless.

Sam Levinson's work has long been accused of fetishising young women. Actors themselves have pushed back. Sydney Sweeney called certain nude scenes "unnecessary," while Martha Kelly described some as having a "gross paedophilia vibe."

Adult film actor-turned-performer Chloe Cherry has spoken about being cast in Euphoria and immediately pushed into discomfort. 

"We just met and said, 'Hey, how are you?' and then shot the scene," she recalled. 

Chloe Cherry as Faye in Euphoria.

Levinson reportedly wanted her completely naked on her very first day on set, even considering staging her covered in fake blood before being talked down.

In The Idol, the camera barely pretends otherwise. Jocelyn, played by Lily-Rose Depp, exists in a near-constant state of undress: designer thongs and the occasional strip of material. She is beaten with a hairbrush, sexually manipulated in front of a room, and reduced to a body that produces "orgasmic vocals." The camera watches. The characters watch. The audience is made complicit.

Lily-Rose Depp as Jocelyn in The Idol.

BLACKPINK's Jennie, who made her Hollywood debut with The Idol, was merely treated as an object in the show. "They didn't let her talk that much. Her job was to sit there and look pretty, basically," a source said. 

BLACPINK Jennie in The Idol.

Sandeep Reddy Vanga's women fare no better. In Kabir Singh, Preeti (Kiara Advani) is the protagonist's "bandi (his girl)" before she even speaks. 

A still from Kabir Singh.

In Arjun Reddy, Preeti (played by Shalini Pandey) is stalked, claimed, and slapped, yet the narrative bends to frame this as passion. 

A still from Arjun Reddy.

In Animal, Geetanjali (Rashmika Mandanna) is reduced to her biological function, her menstruation mocked, her body discussed as reproductive utility.

A still from Animal.

And then there's Vanga's own justification, "If you can't slap, if you can't touch your woman wherever you want, if you can't kiss, I don't see emotion there."

Rage-Bait As Creative Strategy

Neither Sam Levinson nor Sandeep Reddy Vanga appears unaware of the backlash they generate. If anything, they seem to design for it.

Animal is clearly a feminist rage-bait, a film that dares you to call it misogynistic. Its structure almost invites criticism, only to dismiss it as oversensitivity. 

The "alpha vs beta" framing becomes a shield: if you object, you simply "don't get it."

Similarly, Levinson's work thrives in controversy cycles. Euphoria became ground zero for a new breed of parasocial television fandom, where discourse spirals into obsession. The Idol was widely labelled "torture porn" and "rape fantasy," yet its excesses only amplified attention.

Even behind the scenes, the pattern holds. Reports suggested The Idol shifted direction because it leaned too much into a "female perspective." The rewrites, according to insiders, turned it into "like sexual torture porn."

The Male Gaze, Unfiltered

Sam Levinson once defended his work by saying, "We live in a very sexualised world. Especially in the States, the influence of pornography is strong in the psyche of young people."

But the criticism is not that his work reflects this reality, it's that it revels in it. There is little interrogation, only replication.

Vanga, meanwhile, dismisses criticism outright: "I didn't think much about it. I don't think that Kabir Singh was a misogynistic film. Only four or five people felt offended and created noise about it."

And when challenged, he doubles down-attacking critics, belittling dissent, even threatening to replace an actor's "face with AI".

Both filmmakers position themselves as misunderstood provocateurs. 

But the pattern is consistent: women are framed through a lens that prioritises how they are seen, used, and controlled, rarely how they feel.

For Them, Women Are Props

Perhaps the most damning similarity is this: women in both universes rarely exist as fully realised individuals.

In Euphoria, sex workers appear not as characters but as props... aimed only at adding aesthetic appeal and perverse provocation. Their stories are absent, their bodies are not.

In The Idol, Jocelyn didn't seem to exist outside of being sexy or having sex. Even potentially rich characters like Leia are flattened into passivity.

In Vanga's films, women orbit male protagonists. Their purpose is to be loved, controlled, punished, or redeemed. Their agency is secondary, if present at all.

The Illusion Of Depth

What complicates the conversation, and perhaps enables it, is that both Sam Levinson and Sandeep Reddy Vanga are technically competent. Stylish. Visually striking. Capable of moments that feel profound.

Euphoria was second only to Game of Thrones in HBO's most-watched rankings. Its performances, especially from Zendaya, are widely praised.

But craft cannot indefinitely obscure intent. The Idol reveals the latent misogyny and exploitation buried in Euphoria's underbelly.

Similarly, Animal's technical ambition cannot mask what it fundamentally communicates: that violence, particularly against women, is not just natural, but meaningful.

Two Sides Of The Same Lens

At some point, the parallels stop feeling coincidental and start feeling definitive. 

Because when you strip away the aesthetics: the neon haze of Euphoria, the glossy sleaze of The Idol, the hyper-masculine chaos of Animal, what remains is the same gaze. The same impulses. The same storytelling priorities.

Sam Levinson and Sandeep Reddy Vanga may operate in different cultural ecosystems, but their work arrives at an eerily similar place: a world where women are persistently reduced to bodies, to functions, to instruments of male emotion and male spectacle.

Both filmmakers insist, in their own ways, that this is honesty. That this is reality. That this is what love, desire, or power looks like when stripped of pretence.

But what they're really revealing, over and over again, is not the truth about relationships or society, but the limits of their own perspective.

And that's what makes the comparison stick.

Not because it's provocative, or catchy, or convenient, but because it fits too well to ignore.

Sam Levinson isn't just a controversial creator working in Hollywood. He is, increasingly unmistakably, its version of Sandeep Reddy Vanga.