Mrs.

Story:

A remake of the 2021 Malayalam film The Great Indian Kitchen, Mrs. is a 2024 Indian drama film in Hindi. The film, which was directed by Arati Kadav and starred Sanya Malhotra, is about a newlywed woman who must deal with archaic patriarchal customs. Kanwaljit Singh and Nishant Dahiya are co-stars.

The movie made its debut at the Melbourne Indian Film Festival in 2024 and was also shown at the New York Indian Film Festival.  It was made available on ZEE5 on February 7, 2025. Critics gave it favorable reviews, especially for Malhotra’s performance.

In an extremely conventional and patriarchal household, Richa, an educated dancer, is forced into an arranged marriage to a doctor named Diwakar. Things start to go wrong while the wife’s household routine starts in the beautiful joy of a new marriage. The ladies are left to handle the menial tasks of the kitchen, like cleaning, cutlery, and dripping faucets, while the men primarily use their phones or practice yoga. Because of how patriarchal the family is, her mother-in-law gives the father-in-law the toothbrush as he relaxes on the verandah.

The males eat first and then leave the place in a mess, not caring how the women would be able to eat after them. Their comfort and convenience always take precedence over their wives’ needs. Her mother-in-law proceeds to care for her seven-month pregnant daughter as the new wife gradually acclimates to these unfamiliar surroundings and eventually comes to terms with them.

She is solely responsible for cooking, cleaning, and other domestic duties. Her conceited husband disregards her wants and emotions. He comments that she seems to know everything about the subject and patronizingly informs her that he should be attracted to her for foreplay when she tells him that having sex hurts and requests some foreplay, which makes her weep herself to sleep.

Because a lady in the home gives prosperity to the family, her father-in-law prohibits her from getting a job. She is horrified to learn how regressive the family’s views on menstruation are when she starts getting her periods. However, she relishes her alone time and recuperation, and her husband is surprised that she even has periods because he assumed they were expecting a child. She is separated from her former life and left to deal with visitors and backhanded patriarchal remarks.

All of these injustices culminate in the wife abandoning the family for her freedom and dignity and hurling murky kitchen sink water at her husband and father-in-law. The movie closes with her working as a freelance dance instructor and using dance to express her suffering as her ex-husband remarries and appears to find the kind of wife he was seeking.