Mrs: Sanya Malhotra is Bollywood’s posterchild for smash-the-patriarchy cinema, and her Neglected Housewife trilogy is one for the ages

It made sense, given the socio-political landscape of the preceding few years, for a pioneering example of ‘female rage’ cinema to take the crown in 2022. It’s a sub-genre of feminist filmmaking that has only become more popular in recent times. Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles has likely inspired — directly or indirectly — everything from Lars von Trier’s The Nymphomaniac to our very own The Great Indian Kitchen, the Malayalam-language masterpiece that was recently remade in Hindi, under the title Mrs. Surprisingly, Mrs is able to craft an identity of its own, difficult as the same task might be for its protagonist. And the biggest reason behind this is Sanya Malhotra’s stellar central performance — among the many that she has delivered in her career.

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Sanya Malhotra headlines Mrs, also featuring Nishant Dahiya and Kanwaljit Singh.

Malhotra has always been excellent at playing characters like this — wide-eyed, woeful, but when the moment calls for it, also a little wicked. In Mrs, she plays Richa, a young woman who enters into an arranged marriage with a gynaecologist named Diwakar. Anyone who has watched The Great Indian Kitchen would know what happens next; our protagonist discovers that her husband his family are deeply patriarchal. Not in the Sandeep Reddy Vanga way — nobody is asking anyone to lick their shoes, although footwear certainly becomes a topic of contention — but more matter-of-factly. The men eat before the women; they expect them to serve as personal butlers, and treat them as generally inferior.

The character was played by Nimisha Sajayan in the original film, directed by Jeo Baby. Her fantastic performance evoked exactly the kind of anger that you’d expect it to. The key difference between the characters, however, is that Richa goes out of her way to please her husband and father-in-law, played by Nishant Dahiya and Kanwaljit Singh, respectively. Many of Malhotra’s scenes revolve around her silent reactions to the outrageous behaviour that Richa is subjected to. The character’s imprisonment, which became quite literal in the original film, is more psychological in Mrs.

The Great Indian Kitchen unfolded like a ticking time-bomb; stylistically, it was a worthy companion to Uncut Gems, or, more appropriately, the excellent French film Full Time, in which a single mother scrapes by a living as a maid at a fancy Paris hotel. Directed by Arati Kadav, Mrs gives itself room to breathe. Malhotra is asked to communicate complex emotions wordlessly, sometimes even in the same scene. She is excited to look after the household when her mother-in-law leaves for a brief vacation; she is disheartened when Diwakar and his dad disregard her efforts; she is baffled by their casual cruelty, disgusted by their entitlement. Richa is humiliated in front of visiting guests; she’s livid at her husband for abandoning her, and utterly shattered when he — and there can be no two ways about this — rapes her repeatedly.

In her career, Malhotra has inadvertently curated a spiritually connected neglected housewife trilogy. It was observed that after the release of Mrs on ZEE5 — the platform claimed that it broke viewership records, without providing any concrete data, of course — Malhotra’s Netflix films, Meenakshi Sundareshwar and Pagglait, witnessed enough of an uptick in attention that they both broke into the streamer’s top 10. In the romantic drama Meenakshi Sundarershwar, Malhotra played a young wife whose husband moves to a different city immediately after their arranged marriage, essentially throwing her into a long-distance relationship with a man she barely knows.

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Sanya Malhotra in a still from Mrs.

In the darkly humorous Pagglait, she played yet another young woman wedded to a stranger who had the indecency to drop dead mere months after their marriage. Sandhya, the protagonist, can’t pretend to feel any sorrow over his passing — she didn’t really know him — but must play the part of a new widow for his grieving family. Thematically interlinked though they might be, each of these films is formally, and tonally, very different from the others. But it is Malhotra’s staid screen presence that binds them. She has a natural aura about her; she lights up the frame every time she saunters across it. Even when she’s sitting silently in the corner, as she did in the film Photograph, she has the ability to attract your attention. This, you’d imagine, is what star-power means. Malhotra’s increasingly admirable filmography seems to be dedicated to bringing a spark to characters who may find theirs being diminished.

In Pagglait, the extent of the protagonist’s rebellion is limited to sneaking out and having a plateful of panipuri. Compared to Richa’s dreams of becoming a dancer in Mrs, this seems positively minuscule. But here’s the thing, when a person is trapped in the cage of patriarchy, breaking out is breaking out is breaking out. It is creatively criminal to romantise the idea of a sacrificing woman. There is, however, a case to be made against men who quash the dreams of their spouses to further their own.