darlings movie review in hindi

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• Darlings Movie Review In Hindi Starring Alia Bhatt Shefali Shah Vijay Varma

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Darlings Review : A satirical portrayal of love and abuse in a marriage

In-depth analysis.

Our overall critic’s rating is not an average of the sub scores below.

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Users' Reviews

Refrain from posting comments that are obscene, defamatory or inflammatory, and do not indulge in personal attacks, name calling or inciting hatred against any community. Help us delete comments that do not follow these guidelines by marking them offensive . Let's work together to keep the conversation civil.

Somnath Chakravarty 674 days ago

The reviewer should have mentioned Vijay Verma's sublime performance as well.

User RAGHU 759 days ago

A Well Made Satirical and Thought Provoking Dark Comedy.

PratikShah 781 days ago

Enjoyed the movie, new concept, small actors, good direction

Hope 790 days ago

Nice movie.. A serious issue of domestic violence is dealt with real scenarios, dilemmas and dollops of humor.. All the actors have played their role very well making it a movie worth watching..

prashant parekh 799 days ago

Alia 0 Shefali 5 Movie 0

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Darlings movie review: Alia Bhatt brings out her quirky best in this dark comedy with questionable story

Darlings movie review: alia bhatt gives one of her best performances in darlings, a story about a woman's revenge on her violent husband..

The husband is an alcoholic who holds no remorse for assaulting his wife every night, the wife is head over heels in love with the man and doesn't mind cooking breakfast — the staple bun omelette — every morning for him with bruises all over — this may be a regular occurrence in many Indian households, but rarely gets talked about the way it should. Picking a subject like domestic violence for a dark comedy isn't ideal, but Darlings, starring Alia Bhatt , Shefali Shah and Vijay Varma, manages to hit the nail on the head. Directed by debutante Jasmeet K Reen, it is a quirky (as ironical as it may sound) take on how abuse against women and men is normalised. Nothing justifies the actions of either, but it's interesting to see the story pan out in a way that it never really looks unsettling. (Also read: 'Gauri Khan doesn't like anything', says Alia Bhatt, shares her review of Darlings )

Badrunissa Shaikh aka Badru (Bhatt) is smitten by roadside romeo Hamza Shaikh (Vijay Varma), and marries him as soon as he secures himself a government job. Cut to three years later and life after marriage, we see Bhatt getting beaten up every night for a new reason every time. Sometimes it's a kankar in the food, sometimes just because she sat in a colony meeting without the husband's consent. And once because he thinks she's having an affair. The intensity of abuse gets disturbing and more intense with each day, until one day when Badru decides to stand up and take charge. From that point, Darlings shows how a middle-class mother-daughter duo (Shah and Bhatt), who is caught in their own circumstantial hang-ups, gradually discovers their inner strength to survive in a city like Mumbai, battling all odds.

With a runtime of two hours 14 minutes, the film is well-paced with interesting revelations being made one after the other. Reen's story that she has co-written Parveez Sheikh is gripping and does trigger emotions of angst, helplessness and empathy. More than the story, the dialogues by Vijay Maurya (along with Sheikh and Reen) are impressive and genuinely make the film fit into the dark comedy genre. Some one-liners and comic punches are so subtle that if you don't pay attention, you won't understand why the person sitting next to you is laughing so hard. Wait for the climax that is funny and sad in its own way.

But in parts, the story does bother you when domestic violence is used as a ploy to trigger laughs — a woman sticking by her husband despite being abused, a man showing no sign of regret or for his actions, silent spectators shown as caricatures. At a time when more progressive and empowering stories are being liked by audiences, Darlings make you sit back and think, 'Did we really need a film like this to make a point or give a message?' At times, the film appears to be dealing with the situation at a surface level and does not seem to want to delve deeper into figuring out the psyche of such men, who think domestic violence is normal and just blame it on alcohol.

Moreover, Darlings is loaded with stereotypical characters, too. A lady who owns a salon on the ground floor, is privy to the scenario, but would rather discuss it with her clients than take any action. There's a trusted uncle, butcher Kasim Bhai (Rajesh Sharma) who covers up for the family's dirty actions. There's also Hamza's cunning boss (Kiran Karmarkar) who makes his life hell and loves to poke his nose in other people's business.

That being said, performances in Darlings take the cake. Bhatt is in full form; her quirky lines, dialogue delivery, vulnerable expressions, emotional meltdowns help connect with her on a deeper level. In fact, in some portions, she reminded me of Gully Boy's Safeena. Playing her onscreen mother is Shah, who delivers a phenomenal performance, and is way more restrained as compared to her recent outings in Humans and Jalsa. Shah is endearing, strong and lends the apt support to Bhatt's story.

Varma is impressive as Hamza and does succeed in making you hate him. He's cruel and unreasonable and his character, I felt, is written in the most realistic manner. Roshan Mathew as Zulfi is another character to watch out for. He might have in-your-face scenes, but whatever little he gets to perform, he doesn't go unnoticed. I wish there were more scenes with him, and his bond with Shah and Bhatt was fleshed out in a better way.

The camaraderie between Bhatt and Shah is perhaps on the strongest USPs of Darlings. It is rather a clever move on the part of filmmakers to have this mother-daughter story at the heart of the film, and not just focus on the domestic violence angle between the couple. But when tables turn and Hamza is the supposed victim at the hands of his merciless wife and her mother, violence against men somehow appears to look like a joke. Of course, Badru's actions are justified for she's full of vengeance and hatred, but somewhere it does make you question the very premise of Darlings. I won't be surprised if many diss Bhatt for agreeing to play a role that's seemingly misandrist, but then, we have to take everything with a pinch of salt.

Watch Darlings for some hard-hitting realities of our society, ace performances, dark humour.

Darlings Director: Jasmeet K. Reen Cast: Alia Bhatt, Shefali Shah, Vijay Varma, Roshan Mathew

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Darlings Film Review: A Dark Comedy That Explores Why Women Stay In Abusive Marriages

Trigger warning : Mentions of domestic abuse and intimate partner violence

“ Darlings ”, directed by debutante Jasmeet K Reen, starring Alia Bhatt, Shefali Shah, and Vijay Varma in lead roles, is a dark comedy that revolves around an abusive marriage and how a mother-daughter duo navigates through it. 

In many aspects, Darlings is quite a refreshing watch – be it the intersectional space the protagonists belong to, the witty exchanges between a worldly-wise mother and a rosy-eyed daughter, and the excellent performances by the cast that stay true to the genre. 

Darlings introduces us to two women – Badrunissa Shaikh (Badru) and Shamshunnisa Anzari (Shamshu) played by Alia Bhatt and Shefali Shah respectively. Badru lives with her government employee husband Hamza Shaikh (Vijay Varma), who beats her up night after night, for whatever trivial reason that angers him. The following day he would promptly try and make up with Badru by pinning his anger and abuse on his alcoholism, with proclamations of love.

In the same chawl as Badru and Hamza, lives Shamshu, Badru’s mother – a feisty, independent, single woman trying to set up a Dabba business with the help of her friend Zulfi (Roshan Mathew). Shamshu, unlike Badru, sees right through the kind of man Hamza is and keeps asking her daughter to leave the abusive marriage. But Badru sticks on, with an unshakable conviction in her husband’s ‘ love ’, hoping that she can fix amza and his ways.

Why do women stay in abusive marriages?

More often than not, it is the hope that the man would mend his ways, that makes a woman stay in an abusive marriage. In Badru’s case, she has no children to stick on for, and has a very supportive mother who urges her to come back home. Despite this, Badru sticks on because she believes Hamza loves her and that it is upon her to change him.

Where does Badru get this notion? Clearly not from her mother. Badru holds a mirror to a huge number of women who are conditioned and gaslighted by the patriarchy into believing that love and abuse can co-exist. Whenever Hamza senses that Badru’s devotion towards him is down by a notch, he is quick to cajole her with hollow promises and grand gestures of love.

Perhaps the greatest takeaway from Darlings would be that open communication between a mother and daughter might as well be the best tool to break cycles of violent, generational trauma. As the story unravels, the audience learns that Shamshu has seen it all and done it all – and that the fight inside comes as a result of this

Even when she eventually files a police complaint against him, he manages to use her desire to have a child to his advantage and walks free after convincing her that his abusive nature comes from his alcoholism and it is separate from the man he is and his love for her. 

Director Jasmeet K. Reen shows how deep patriarchy has its claws lodged within women by brilliantly contrasting Badru’s gullible nature with her mother Shamshu’s no-nonsense attitude and her impatience with her daughter defending her abusive husband. Despite Bardu knowing that her mother is her safety net and encountering a too-good-to-be-true police station that seems to be very supportive of taking action upon her complaints, Badru sticks on until the day she realises that it is not alcohol that stirs the demon in her husband, but he himself is the demon she must slay.

Also read: Understanding Symbolic Violence Through Kumbalangi Nights & Thappad

How open conversations help to break violent cycles of abuse

As the viewer feels sorry for Badru, who endures violent physical abuse day after day, a sigh of relief is heaved when she meets her mother Shamshu, every day after Hamza leaves for work. Despite Badru not acting up on her mother’s advice to leave Hamza, she is well aware that she can confide in Shamshu and can count on her mother, come what may.

Perhaps the greatest takeaway from Darlings would be that open communication between a mother and daughter might as well be the best tool to break cycles of violent, generational trauma. As the story unravels, the audience learns that Shamshu has seen it all and done it all – and that the fight inside comes as a result of this.

Shamshu leads by example and reinforces that being independent and alone is much safer for a woman than leading a conventional, outwardly-normal, socially accepted marital life like that of Badru. What women need more than anything are fellow women like Shamshu, who offer safe spaces and assure that leaving an abusive relationship will only make them happier. For Badru, luckily, that friend is her mother. 

Despite being anchored on a plot with immense possibilities, Darlings does falter at places when a character like Shamshu disses divorce as dangerous, that no one would marry her daughter again, and says that the world has only changed for those who are on Twitter. Darlings slips at places from the dark comedy it sets out to etch into being slightly slow and melodramatic, but as though like a quick afterthought, it slips right back on track to being enjoyable and witty.

Badru is not an aspirational hero but rather, a cautionary tale on how the patriarchal society has made women believe love and abuse can co-exist. Darlings holds a mirror to the conditioning and gaslighting that makes a woman unable to acknowledge the complex structures of violence around her, let alone break free of them

The title track composed by Vishal Bharadwaj and penned by Gulzar is refreshing and endearing, but a continued smattering of cutesy plurals throughout the movie seems forced in places. Alia Bhat does a great job as the naive, hopeful, young Badru, especially in the first half where she oscillates between being abused and loved in repeated intervals by Hamza.

Vijay Varma is perfect as Hamza and he is successful in communicating the sadism and toxicity very effectively. In no instance has he dramatised or exaggerated the character. Rosshan Mathew’s Zulfi is a very refreshing and well-written character, and the actor has done justice by portraying Zulfi as a lovable, good-hearted, boy next door.

Also read: Maid: Netflix Series Addresses The Complexities Of Generational Trauma Between Mothers And Daughters

Topping all these delightful performances is Shefali Shah’s brilliant portrayal of Shamshu, which is nuanced and done with the correct amount of restraining needed to balance the lightness of the narrative with the gravitas of the topic. It is interesting that the movie is set completely in a Muslim milieu and all the characters – good and bad – are from within the community itself and it strays away from the usual Muslim stereotypes in Bollywood.

Badru is not an aspirational hero but rather, a cautionary tale on how the patriarchal society has made women believe love and abuse can co-exist. Darlings holds a mirror to the conditioning and gaslighting that makes a woman unable to acknowledge the complex structures of violence around her, let alone break free of them. 

The film is streaming on Netflix.

Meenakshi Sajeev is a poet and Corporate Communication Strategist. She is the author of the anthologies “One Woman Island” and “The Unlabelled Happy Woman”. She can be found on  Instagram  and  Facebook .

Featured Image Source: Mint

“Badru holds a mirror to a huge number of women who are conditioned and gaslighted by the patriarchy into believing that love and abuse can co-exist.”

I watched the movie and didn’t see any patriarchy. I just saw a woman who didn’t have common sense.

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Darlings review: Alia Bhatt raises the bar for movies with meaning

Darlings movie review: alia bhatt, vijay varma, shefali shah and roshan mathew deliver excellent performances in a film that is aware of what it is. a few forced comic touches spoil the effect though..

There are a few things that ‘ Darlings ’, a film which brings domestic violence to the fore, gets absolutely right, the most striking of them being the way it has created its couple — a husband who keeps beating his wife; and the wife who keeps believing, in a curdled mix of hope and desperation, that ‘ek din woh badal jaayenge’ (one day he will change).

A serial wife-beater doesn’t do it because he is forced into it; he does it because he likes it. It makes him feel like a big man in his own house, after being unmanned everywhere else, especially in his workplace, where he is treated like dirt. And a woman who keeps ignoring the battering, hiding all evidence under a smiling facade, does it from a place of almost unreal resilience that most fellow-sufferers recognise.

On that score, Alia Bhatt and Vijay Varma are spot on, as the beautifully-written Badrunissa and Hamza Sheikh, whose ‘love marriage’ a few years down the line becomes a cyclical series of beatings followed by apologies. And this is the other crucial element that feels just right: when Hamza, in the light of the day, looks at Badru dutifully making his pao-omlette breakfast, he is overcome. He tries making up to her, she resists, he lays on the charm that made her fall for him in the first place, she melts. The pattern is hard to break.

It is a toxic world, but it is theirs, and till the time we stay with the back-and-forth between them, the film holds us. Bhatt’s quicksilver change of moods reveals her emotional temperature underneath: very few actors working in Bollywood today have her ability to register moods without saying a word. And Varma is terrific: as a ticket collector at the bottom of the pole in his office, slaving under a jovial bully (Karmakar), he hasn’t really got what he wanted, so he will make sure that no one else can get what they want. It’s all command-and-control, and he never puts a foot wrong.

Watch the Darlings trailer here: 

The other powerful act is from Shefali Shah .  As Shamshunissa aka Shamshu, mother to Badru, she extends full support to her daughter, but she is not just a door-stopper. We see a woman using whatever she has to keep her head above the water, the hard grind she has had to go through to raise her daughter single-handedly only mentioned in passing. She is trying to make something of herself, and the portions between her and her earnest, handsome accomplice (Rohan Mathew) as she starts laying out her wares as a home-cook, lend a touch of amusement to the proceedings. He is very good too, and you want to see more of them, an odd pair that makes you smile.

It’s fine till there. It’s fine till there. The fact that the main characters are Muslim, living in a chawl with other Muslim characters, is not used to as a signpost ; they just happen to be Muslim, and while they are aware of the othering that goes on around them, they are quite capable of dealing with it matter-of-factly, conversationally, and clearly.

Post-interval, in a bid to lighten the ‘heavy’ topic of domestic abuse, the film starts to build on its black comedy aspect. Between the cooking of ‘mirchi ka salans’ and spicy biryanis, mother and daughter dream up clunky ways of revenge. A heavy-handed cop trying to be helpful (Maurya) shows up. Injecting humour into darkness is an easy temptation: how do you keep viewers entertained? The result is tonal confusion. The gags don’t really land, the comic touches feel forced, and a contrived sequence or two becomes annoying in a film which is otherwise so aware of its characters and their motivations.

But the climactic sequence, which has satisfying heft, rescues ‘Darlings’ from getting derailed. With her maiden production, dotted with a clutch of excellent performances, Alia Bhatt has raised the bar for movies with meaning, something a lost-in-the-woods Bollywood can do with.

Darlings movie cast: Alia Bhatt, Shefali Shah, Vijay Varma, Roshan Mathew, Rajesh Gupta, Vijay Maurya, Kiran Karmakar Darlings movie director: Jasmeet K Reen Darlings movie rating: 2.5 stars

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