Mrs Deshpande review: Madhuri Dixit show is disappointingly more off than on

Mrs Deshpande review: Series driver Madhuri Dixit is ripe for roles which are out of her comfort zone: she no longer has to appear glamorous to catch our attention. But she’s written flatly, like many other stretches.

Rating: 2 out of 5

Mrs Deshpande is streaming on Disney Plus Hotstar.

Mrs Deshpande review: A serial killer is on the loose in Mumbai, targeting his victims with a coil of lurid green rope, arranging them in different poses in different locations. A grizzled cop (Priyanshu Chatterjee) with a long memory remembers a much older series of killings 25 years back in Pune, whose perpetrator has been in prison for that long. Are these copycat killings? But who would know about those murders, carefully buried in dusty case files?

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Cue Mrs Deshpande (Madhuri Dixit) who is whistled up by the senior policeman to help them crack this case, whose victims seem to have no connection to each other other than a striking similarity in the modus operandi of their murders. She’s been far away from Mumbai, in Hyderabad central jail, being a model prisoner, suspiciously good, in fact.

A younger cop (Siddharth Chandekar) assigned on the case is against the decision. He believes that a smart killer like Mrs Deshpande will find a chink in their armour, and instead of helping them will make sure that she finds loopholes in the security cordon.

The six-part series, based on French thriller La Mante, is directed by Nagesh Kukunoor, who’s been having quite a busy year, with his show on the Rajiv Gandhi assassination being out earlier this year. And Madhuri Dixit seems right for the job at hand, with her character’s plain demeanour hiding a steely glint: it’s clear that Mrs Deshpande’s task is still not complete, and you know that she will leave no stone unturned to get it done.

We get a bunch of ancillary characters revolving around Mrs D. A curly-haired fellow (Kavin Dave) is roaming around, threatening people. A young man, heavily tattooed, shows up at the cop’s wife’s door, and you wonder what’s going to happen next. But the crucial character who’s supposed to keep us mesmerised, Mrs Deshpande, manages to dredge up menace only sporadically. Dixit’s mobile face has always been her most potent ally, and here it stays mostly static: it could have been a deliberate choice by the director, which the actor follows through with, but leaves you unmoved.

It’s strange because Kukunoor managed to pull off a terrific on-the-edge series in The Hunt. Here, the tension keeps leaching. It’s doubly strange because series driver Madhuri Dixit is right for roles which are out of her comfort zone: she no longer has to appear glamorous to catch our attention. But she’s written flatly, like many other stretches in the show: the flashbacks of her childhood which gives us hints as to how an innocent young girl turned into a killer are much more impactful.

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Result: Mrs Deshpande is disappointingly off and on, more off than on.

Mrs Deshpande cast: Madhuri Dixit, Siddharth Chandekar, Priyanshu Chatterjee, Kavin Dave
Mrs Deshpande director: Nagesh Kukunoor
Mrs Deshpande rating: Two and a half stars

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