Mrs. Deshpande Review | A Dull Serial Killer Drama That Will Only Murder Your Patience

Nagesh Kukunoor’s Mrs. Deshpande announces its creative fallibility early on. About fifteen minutes in, a character helpfully explains through on-the-nose expository dialogue that the name “Mrs. Deshpande” sounds like that of an ordinary, unremarkable housewife, thus clarifying the show’s supposedly clever intent. The line signals the series’ fundamental lack of faith in its audience’s interpretive intelligence.

This line arrives just as Commissioner Arun Khatri (a painfully wooden Priyanshu Chatterjee) is persuading his superior that the Mumbai Police must enlist the help of Zeenat Fatima, aka Seema Deshpande (Madhuri Dixit), a convicted serial killer serving a life sentence. Three murders have occurred using Deshpande’s exact modus operandi, and Khatri is convinced that only the original can help catch the copycat.

Naturally, his superior warns that if Deshpande escapes or if the media discovers this “unusual” arrangement, the department’s reputation will be in shambles. We are also told, with straight-faced solemnity, how something like this has never happened before as though crime television has not been recycling this conceit for decades. A few moments later, the exact same explanatory conversation occurs yet again between two other characters.

From the first fifteen minutes alone, we know that the show will handhold the audience through every emotional beat, every plot turn, and every revelation, leaning heavily on familiar genre motifs and rote dialogue. This, of course, does not mean that the gormless writing is otherwise exemplary or manages to avoid gaping plotholes.

Deshpande agrees to help on one condition: the investigation must be led by officer Tejas Phadke (Siddharth Chandekar), who also happens to be her estranged son, who does not remember her.

An official remake of the French series La Mante (2017)—a show that itself drew ire for being a dramatic, plothole-riddled mess—Mrs. Deshpande becomes another act of self-sabotage from JioHotstar and the house of Applause Entertainment. Search: The Naina Murder Case, which starred Konkona Sen Sharma, also had similar pitfalls. Instead of fixing the originals’ flaws, these adaptations magnify them, before adding in a few more.

But Mrs. Deshpande is actually the bargain bin knockoff of the original. Even a cut-copy-paste approach couldn't elevate this to any decent heights. As far as remakes go, you are better off watching Queen Mantis, the Korean adaptation which also released this year.

Any crime story that needs to loudly announce the brilliance or danger of its central character repeatedly has already failed at character writing. Deshpande is positioned as this mythic, terrifying figure, but Dixit is never allowed to be vicious. She is an ideological killer. Her violence is not impulsive. All that is fine, but she is restrained to the point of inertia. She is way too calm, but never in an unnerving way. She is maternal, domestic, and downright glowing. There is no menace in her nor any real psychological unpredictability. If there was an award for the nicest, least terrifying serial killer, then Mrs. Deshpande would win it hands down and this is sincerely meant in a derogatory sense.

For an actor like Dixit, coming across a character with shades of delicious psychopathy is rare. So, this is very much a missed opportunity to deliver a performance that could have been riveting. It could have been a career milestone. But here we are with a whole lot of nothing.

The show tries to subvert gendered tropes. Her killing method is not conventional. Deshpande does not poison her victims, as fictional female killers often tend to do. Instead, she uses Krav Maga to overpower and strangle them. But even this trope reversal is clumsily handled. The script goes out of its way to specify that Krav Maga is an Israeli martial art, a detail that feels gratuitous and tone-deaf in a moment when Israel faces widespread international condemnation and boycott calls for its ongoing genocide of Palestinians and conflicts across the region. The reference adds nothing narratively and leaves an unpleasant aftertaste.

Technical sloppiness only compounds the show’s conceptual failures. We are asked to believe that a rope recovered from a decades-old crime scene is still a vivid, unfaded green, pristine and unfrayed. It is a small detail, but emblematic of the show’s laziness. The performances do not help either. Across the board, the acting is uniformly and laughably juvenile. Coincidences drive large swathes of the plot. The much-touted twist also lands with a thud. It is not the shocking reveal the show believes it to be, largely because the groundwork is so poorly laid. By the time it comes to the surface, the audience would have long drowned and died of boredom.

Most troubling is the series’ handling of a trans storyline. In a cultural context where trans communities already face intense vilification, suspicion, and violence, the choices made by the show remain deeply messy.

What makes all this more disheartening (and even somewhat infuriating) is the name attached to the project. This is not the Kukunoor who made Iqbal (2005) or Dor (2006). The direction here is virtually nonexistent, the writing abysmal. In the end, Mrs Deshpande is a substandard, boring series that will only murder your patience.