Shape of Momo Review | Tribeny Rai’s Elegant Debut Prises Through Intergenerational Womanhood

World premiering at the Busan Film Festival, Tribeny Rai’s gently observed debut feature Shape of Momo is spearheaded by one of the year’s most compelling, dynamically fraught heroines. In a rich, revealing mix, Bishnu (Gaumaya Gurung) is no-nonsense, supremely sure of herself, abrasive and also riddled with upper-class arrogance. Returning home to Sikkim after quitting her Delhi job, she’s struck again with all that she thought she had escaped. Bishnu’s journey grows mired with assumptions around womanhood, joy ambushed.

Fierce and unapologetic however, Bishnu chafes at patriarchal expectations. Once home, she’s shoving past certain ways she’s supposed to behave. For all the ambition, ultimately she must settle, marry within the community. Her mother (Pashupati Rai) pops the proposal of a local politician’s son Gyan (Rahul Mukhia), an architect, which she instantly dismisses. Prejudice and patronization are everywhere she turns. In the opening scene, the village elders hail her for making Sikkim proud with her work. Yet, they swiftly undercut with complimenting her parents for raising her as they would a son. Gurung is excellent at the barely concealed disappointment and annoyance. In a latter scene, a spent, sapped Bishnu lashes out at her mother, demanding, “Why must we endure and tolerate everything?”

We encounter the myriad faces of this appeal throughout the film. At times, Bishnu judges her mother harshly. She sees her as bending too much to suit the community. But as her mother reminds her in one of the film’s most persuasive scenes, it’s she who has to live with them. Neither will she bear pity. But Rai doesn’t keep it all glum, peppering occasional scatological humor.

Bishnu is insistent on being perfectly capable unto herself whereas her mother is stuck carefully straddling a densely hierarchical space as a widowed woman. Tradition and community are a constant chokehold, traced through three generations. Bishnu’s mother and grandmother are trapped. Junu (Shyama Shree Sherpa), her sister, too has co-opted it, but there are frays. Shape of Momo rings most resoundingly in how each woman grapples with their socially ascribed role. How far till they go to surrender or break away? Differences and clashes yank out what one woman can offer the other, cutting across generations. But how willing are they to stretch their notions?

A key moment sharply registers Bishnu’s sister being a mirror of her own future. The realization is so visceral that she staggers back. The horrified recognition becomes the film’s point of arching Bishnu away from doom. Aided by DP Archana Ghangrekar’s elegant, lambent framing, Rai precisely mines moments of reckoning within a single exchange. A slick shift of focus between the sisters in a confessional scene flashes the desires that have been wedged away. Beneath Junu’s cheery front is a deep wistfulness, for all that she lost in marrying early. Bishnu’s strong-willed confidence borne also of financial autonomy contrasts with Junu’s curtailed, marital domesticity. With opposing attitudes, Rai rips through the gulf between conditioning and refusal, dogma and autonomy. The film keeps poking into how Junu’s entrenched defeatism in her marriage and fate has blinded her to other possibilities.

In Shape of Momo, these questions around womanhood are riven with class inflections. Rai and her co-writer Kislay also situate Bishnu’s self-possession vis-à-vis the lower economic strata. A tenant family hovers in the background as a check on Bishnu’s entitlement. She's more severe with them than her mother. Her occasionally brash assertions critically unravel in a bind of class superiority. Rai emphasizes these interpellations. A linear reading of her heroine, predicated on her independence alone, crumples. There’s also a steep, parochial unease around migrants camping close by. That it doesn’t bother Bishnu as much as it does her mother and the villagers bares how communities can get subsumed in themselves.

However, Shape of Momo doesn’t reach much valence or hold much conviction on these vectors. They feel like lesser echoes, loosely evoked and struggling to distinguish themselves within a spikier, far more affecting canvas of women’s identities. Despite a reproachfully effective Wangden Sherpa as the tenant’s son, this tangent risks banal critique. Even when Bishnu is humbled by her obdurate privilege, her amends are soon upstaged by sudden agenda. In this, Rai lends her heroine a full-bodied ambivalence, a mesh of conflicting guilt and greed. Gurung matches in every stride with bristling fury. Bishnu’s selfhood is therein complicated. But this isn’t folded in with fluency. Even the dramatic limbering up with outsider-driven paranoia dies out.

Nevertheless, Rai manages to pinpoint the narrative pulse again. Used to independence, Bishnu notices how overwhelmingly Gyan, with whom she starts going out, begins to take over her family life. The duties and decisions that she would have liked go over in his reins, gladly approved by Bishnu’s mother. He’s not a terrible person, though he does have sexist notions—all which he attributes to his mother. Rai builds enormous suggestive power in supposedly small, everyday acts. When Gyan summarily leaves the table after a meal, the unkempt remains scattered for women to clean up, Bishnu recoils. It’s as if her possible future with him darts past. Shape of Momo assembles Bishnu’s ultimate, well-earned declaration with a wise, lived-in truth. There’s anger bubbling beneath the surface, but Rai’s telling is gracefully limned by how Bishnu re-aligns with life’s most yielding directions. Shape of Momo smelts its heroine’s journey with wondrously reflective daring. The sense of renewal in Bishnu’s trajectory makes it essential viewing.

Shape of Momo had its World Premiere at the Busan International Film Festival 2025.