Jul 07 2026.
views 6This week's watches couldn't be more different on paper, a small-town murder comedy and a true-crime documentary about one of the most disturbing cases in recent memory, but they've got more in common than you'd think. Both arrived with premises that gave me nothing to go on, and both ended up being far sharper (or in one case, far lazier) than expected. First up, Maa Behen, a farce hiding a genuine takedown of small-town gossip culture. Then, Maternal Instinct, a documentary that had one job - do justice to an unbelievable case - and only half-showed up.
Maa Behen sat in my watchlist for weeks, ignored, until a cousin finally pushed me into it. The premise gave me nothing to work with - a dead body, a kitchen, two daughters called in for cleanup - and yet that's exactly the trap. You go in expecting filler and come out having watched something with actual teeth.
Because underneath the farce, this is a film with an agenda. It starts as small-town chaos - nosy neighbour, dead body, a mother (Madhuri Dixit) trying to keep her daughters (Triptii Dimri and Dharna Durga) from unravelling - and slowly turns into something far more pointed: a takedown of every woman who's ever been told to shrink herself to fit the neighbourhood's comfort. The gossip, the judgment, the quiet cruelty of "what will people think" — it's all here, just wearing a comedy's clothes. Triptii Dimri's monologue is the moment the film shows its hand, and it's worth the wait.
The seams show elsewhere - the pacing sags, some scenes overstay their welcome, the tone can't always decide if it's laughing or seething. But none of that matters much once you realise the three women at the centre aren't just carrying the film, they're the entire argument it's making.
The Verdict: Absolutely hit play. It might look unenticing on the surface, but it's a pleasantly surprising, sharp-witted ride that is well worth your time.
Let's address the title first, because Maternal Instinct? For a documentary about a woman who faked an entire pregnancy from scratch and murdered an expectant mother to steal her unborn child? That's not a title, that's a euphemism. It undersells the horror by about a thousand degrees.
If you remember this story breaking a few years ago, you already know the headlines alone were staggering. What you probably didn't know is how calculated the whole thing was - the media coverage back then barely scratched the surface. The documentary lands its early punches well, especially the police footage of her roadside arrest; that scene alone is worth the runtime. But it's downhill from there, because the filmmakers had gold-standard material and decided bronze-level execution would do.
And that's the real frustration here - not that the film fails, but that it barely tries. There's a genuinely fascinating psychological case buried in this story: what kind of childhood, what kind of unravelling, builds toward a deception this elaborate? The documentary isn't interested. It reaches for dramatic music and sensationalism instead of investigation, treating the crime as a plot twist rather than a person. It's still absorbing, because the facts alone are almost too strange to be real, but it trades depth for pace at every turn - and you feel the trade. You'll finish it not satisfied, but Googling.
The Verdict: Gripping because the crime is unbelievable, lazy because the filmmaking refuses to dig. Budget twenty extra minutes afterwards for Wikipedia.
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