Tag Archives: Mona Singh

Movie Review: Subedaar (2026)

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3 Stars (out of 4)

Watch Subedaar on Amazon Prime

Filmmaker Suresh Triveni’s latest movie Subedaar is so tense it’s almost unbearable at times. In terms of achieving the intended tone, it’s an undeniable success. However, that single tone makes it hard to maintain the story momentum.

The first few moments of Subedaar are light-hearted misdirection. Elementary school boys Bablu and Mannu ponder how people in airplanes go to the bathroom and come up with a funny answer. But as the cheerful boys start to run between the heavy machinery dredging sand from the local river, the music becomes ominous. The boys jump in the water. Mannu doesn’t resurface.

He’s not the first kid to drown in the river as a result of industrial mismanagement. The dredgers are controlled by gangster Babli Didi (Mona Singh). She’s currently imprisoned awaiting trial for murder, but her shadow hangs over the town. Mannu’s uncle demands justice, so Babli Didi’s reckless half-brother, Prince (Aditya Rawal), kills him.

Arjun Maurya (Anil Kapoor) is new to this city governed by fear. He recently retired from the military, where he achieved the rank of Subedaar (a junior commissioned officer). His beloved wife just died, and he’s trying to form a relationship with his college-aged daughter Shyama (Radhika Madan). He hardly knows her because his career kept him away from home for most of her life.

The transition from highly organized military life to civilian chaos is unnerving for Arjun. He looks like he’s barely holding it together even while trying to do something ordinary, like close his wife’s bank account. The frazzled bank clerk is so self-focused that he doesn’t register Arjun’s taut expression and the danger that lurks behind it.

The bank offers an early lesson in how the town operates. No one within the structures of power will help. They only protect themselves, particularly when Babli Didi and Prince are concerned. The mantra of the police chief is: “See very little, and forget everything.”

Prince is dangerous because he insists on controlling every interaction, enjoys humiliating people, and resorts to violence fast — and he never faces negative consequences for his brutal behavior. When Arjun refuses to be belittled by Prince and his cronies, it makes the former soldier a target. Arjun’s best friend Prabhakar (Saurabh Shukla) urges him to apologize and move on, but Arjun’s pride won’t allow him to do so.

At the same time, Shyama exposes one of her fellow students for his lewd behavior and is threatened with retaliation. She doesn’t tell her father about this, and he doesn’t tell her about Prince. When goons lurk outside the house at night or throw things at their home in the morning, father and daughter both assume they are the intended target. They’re both right, just at different times of day.

Though not always the main focus of the story, the relationship between Arjun and Shyama is the film’s most compelling. She has every reason to be angry with him, and he feels plenty of guilt mixed with his grief over his wife’s death (Khushbu Sundar plays Arjun’s wife Sudha in some sweet flashbacks). He’s doing the best he can to act like a parent to Shyama, but there’s no quick fix.

Troubled relationships between parents and children featured in Triveni’s two previous directorials as well: 2017’s Tumhari Sulu and 2022’s Jalsa. What makes the storylines work in each film is tremendous acting. Subedaar might be Triveni’s best yet, in that regard.

Kapoor is in top form as Arjun, trying to hold back the sea of emotions inside him. Madan shows us that Shyama’s hostility comes from a place of great pain. Both Kapoor and Madan are both very good in their action scenes. Shukla’s Prabhakar says volumes with a single look, and Singh steals every scene she’s in.

Rawal is utterly loathsome as Prince, which is just what the role calls for. He’s particularly good at invading people’s personal space, because in his mind, it’s all his space. His presence is oppressive because we know there are no good guys coming to the rescue.

That said, a little goes a long way with Prince, especially since he doesn’t change or evolve. The only subplot to offset Prince’s lopsided feud with Arjun is Shyama’s own struggle against stronger opponents, so the experience of watching Subedaar becomes emotionally fatiguing over time. It’s a classic case where chopping twenty minutes from the runtime would actually make things more impactful.

Triveni is improving as a director with each movie. Subedaar is another step in the right direction, with clearer character motivations than in previous films. I’m happy to see it.

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Movie Review: Munjya (2024)

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2 Stars (out of 4)

Watch Munjya on Hulu

Munjya is a nice-looking horror comedy that struggles with its central theme.

The story begins in 1952 in a village in Konkan. A young boy named Gotya (Ayush Ulagadde) is furious that the teenage girl he has a crush on is marrying someone else. He poisons the bride Munni’s fiancé and is publicly whipped by his parents for his destructive obsession. At night, Gotya takes his younger sister Gita (Khushi Hajare) to a sacred tree, intending to sacrifice her to a demon in exchange for Munni’s hand. But Gotya fatally injures himself, binding his spirit to the tree and becoming an evil spirit known as Munjya.

Generations later, timid hairdresser Bittu (Abhay Verma) suffers from frightening visions and hears Munjya’s voice. His mother Pammi (Mona Singh) and paternal grandmother Gita (Suhas Joshi) — the little sister from the intro — shielded him from the family’s sordid history and the role it played in his father’s death. Bittu learns the truth when the family returns to his father’s ancestral village, and he sets out to find the voice that calls to him.

Munjya — who is now a creepy blend of boy and tree — seizes the opportunity to escape, binding himself to Bittu. Death follows, and Munjya vows to kill everyone Bittu cares about in his quest to marry Munni. While Munni herself is now an old woman, her granddaughter Bela (Sharvari) — who happens to be Bittu’s childhood friend and unrequited crush — is her spitting image. Munjya decides he wants Bela instead.

The parallel’s between Munjya’s one-sided love and Bittu’s crush are obvious, but they don’t overlap enough to meaningfully support a theme. Bittu is never in any moral danger of his own preoccupation turning into a violent obsession, and Munjya is so single-minded that he never twists Bittu’s feelings to his own ends. There’s a late mention about mutual consent in relationships, but the idea is otherwise underdeveloped.

Instead, the story — directed by Aditya Sarpotdar and written by Niren Bhatt — treats Bittu’s cowardice as the flaw he must overcome. Yet Bittu is more shy than cowardly. Sure, he’d rather not upset his overbearing mother, and he hasn’t told Bela how he feels, but he’s otherwise pretty brave. He’s planning to study cosmetology in America by himself, and he seeks out Munjya all on his own.

If he’s afraid of Munjya, it’s with good reason. Munjya’s persistence and his capacity for violence are legitimately scary. While there aren’t many jump scares, imagining what it would be like to live harboring a killer demon is frightening enough.

Though billed as a horror comedy, the first 45 minutes are straight horror. Things lighten up a bit when Bittu enlists the help of his filmmaker friend Spielberg (Taranjot Singh), but by that point things are so grim that the balance feels off. The chaotic comic action sequence when the heroes confront Munjya is more tedious than humorous. There are a few very funny jokes, however, including the fraudulent faith-healer Padri’s (Sathyaraj) dubious story about the original vision for Indiana Jones.

An unfortunate side effect of Munjya‘s lackluster story is that none of the acting performances stand out. Everyone is adequate.

Given that the character Munjya is entirely computer generated, one of the big questions is: how does he look? Pretty terrific, actually. He’s substantial enough that his interactions with the characters and the environment feel believable. Munjya sets a new standard for the level of effects quality fans should expect from Hindi films going forward.

Overall, Munjya is a very good-looking movie. The seaside setting and gloomy forests are lovely in their own right. Nighttime shots are perfectly lit to set the mood without obscuring the action. The movie has all the style but needs more substance.

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Movie Review: Laal Singh Chaddha (2022)

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2.5 Stars (out of 4)

Laal Singh Chaddha — an official remake of Forrest Gump — was released with the expectation that it would be yet another blockbuster for Aamir Khan, along the lines of 3 Idiots and PK. Such a high bar was always going to be tough to clear. Laal Singh Chaddha is a perfectly nice movie, but that’s it.

In this version, the Forrest Gump character is Laal Singh Chaddha (Khan). He admits that he’s not too smart, but his life has been full of twists and turns. He recounts his story to his neighbors in a train carriage — an unwilling audience at first, but they wind up riveted by the end.

Young Laal (Ahmad Ibn Umar) grows up in a small farming town where he’s teased for wearing leg braces. His only friend is a girl named Rupa (Hafsa Ashraf). Laal follows every order from Rupa to the letter, so when she orders him to run from bullies, he does so, discovering that he no longer needs his braces.

When Rupa’s father murders her mother during a spat over money, Rupa comes to live with her aunt at Laal’s house, where the older woman works as a housekeeper. Rupa vows to get very rich when she grows up so that she never has to be on the receiving end of the kind of abuse that killed her mom.

Rupa (played as an adult by Kareena Kapoor) is a much more interesting character than Laal. Rupa’s motivations are understandable, and she’s willing to take risks to get what she wants. Those risks come with high-stakes consequences she’s forced to deal with.

Laal, on the other hand, floats through life like a feather on the wind — an obvious visual metaphor the film uses during the opening credits. He doesn’t want anything other than to be with Rupa, and when he can’t be, stuff just happens to him.

A selling point for both Forrest Gump and Laal Singh Chaddha is that both lead characters accidentally wind up in proximity to pivotal events in national history. When Forrest Gump released in 1994, the technology used to put Tom Hanks’ character into historical footage was cutting edge. Thanks to the advent of Photoshop and proliferation of deepfakes in the twenty years since Atul Kulkarni started his Indian adaptation of the screenplay, the altered archival videos in Laal Singh Chaddha are no longer so novel.

There’s also the fact that the movie has little to say about the historical events it features. They exist more as name checks, and Laal’s proximity is often no more consequential than a fan’s attendance at a sporting event.

The magnitude of these historical events belie the film’s themes, which are actually quite small and personal in nature. The moral lessons are things like loyalty and following through on promises even when there’s no one around to hold you accountable. This isn’t a movie about a man who changes the world.

There’s nothing wrong with Laal Singh Chaddha‘s modest goals. It’s a totally watchable film, if a bit too long. Mona Singh is sweet as Laal’s loving mother. Aamir Khan’s wide-eyed performance is not dissimilar from his turn in PK, although that was a better movie.

Kareena Kapoor turns in a masterclass in acting in every scene she’s in. It’s almost unimaginable that she wasn’t first choice for the role (which was reputedly supposed to go to Manushi Chhillar). She may not play the title character, but Laal Singh Chaddha belongs to Kareena Kapoor.

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