Four friends, Luke (Kay Kay Menon), Murgi (Aditya Shrivastava), Joy (Joy Fernandes) and Pondy (Vijay Maurya) are wasted by youth and self-destruction and play together in a band along with a fifth female member named Shiuli (Tejaswini Kolhapure). Luke, the lead singer and self-imposed leader of the pack ensures his dominance in the group by providing accommodation, drugs and food for his wasted and broke friends. Pondy is fascinated by Shiuli who sleeps with rich guys for money. The movie revolves around a kidnapping plot gone wrong, in which the four male band members plan to kidnap another friend Nikhil (Pankaj Saraswat). Nikhil is part of the plot and agrees to get himself kidnapped to extract money out of his rich but miser father. In the process excess of drugs and uncontrolled anger leads to the murder of Nikhil by Luke. Luke blackmails all others and ensures that nobody leaves or confides into the cops. Meanwhile, Shiuli also gets entangled in the plot. The money hungry youngsters then go on to kill the father of Nikhil and a cop (Sharat Saxena) investigating the murder. The plot thickens with a set of betrayal and counter-betrayal leading to an interesting end.

• Kay Kay Menon as Luke Morrison
• Aditya Shrivastava as Murgi
• Vijay Maurya as Pondy
• Joy Fernandes as Joy
• Tejaswini Kolhapure as Shiuli
• Vijay Raj as Anish Ranjan
• Sharat Saxena as Inspector Deshpande
• Pankaj Saraswat as Nikhil

The soundtrack of the film features music composed by Vishal Bhardwaj and lyrics written by Abbas Tyrewala. The album was released by BMG Crescendo in May 2002, and marked the entry of the music publisher into the Hindi film music market.

In September 1993, while Kashyap stayed at the St. Xavier's Boys Hostel, he used to hang out with Adam Avil, Eddie Avil, Luke Kenny and Ulysses Veyra the members of a band—Greek (later Pralay). He took copious notes on how they lead their lives—forty pages of a small notebook, and began writing the script—"in bits and pieces"—for a film that he called Mirage but which would later become Paanch. Kashyap had seen ex-VJ Luke Kenny in a Vikram Kapadia play, and approached him with an incomplete script, but nothing came out of it. Anurag Kashyap Interview Excerpts from the interview (in Hindi) conducted by Pravesh Bhardwaj and Ajay Brahmatmaj Later on, while working with Nair, he came across files related to the Joshi-Abhyankar Serial Murders that took place in Pune in 1976.

"Five very ordinary college kids viciously murdered nine people. I got what I needed to finish my script then."

He had also seen a film, Fun, about two mentally unstable girls murdering an elderly woman. And Paanch was ready to be made into a film. Kashyap says—

"There was a structuring in Fun, which you will also see in Paanch. There was something in Fun. When I began looking for it, I saw a pattern in Last Train to Mahakali, in my own film Paanch and in Auto Narayan. All three films had a similar formula. I am able to analyze it because I have.^[5]

Paanch was screened at Filmfest Hamburg in 2003,^[8] Osian's Cinefan Festival of Asian and Arab Cinema as closing film in 2005,^[9] Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles in 2006^[10] and at Jagran Film Festival in 2016.^[11]