There’s always a certain anticipation when Madhuri Dixit returns to the screen. That carries over to Mrs Deshpande, her latest outing — a six-part series by Nagesh Kukunoor, streaming on JioHotstar. Cast against type, Dixit steps into territory she has rarely explored, her trademark smile taking on a menacing edge. She plays Mrs Deshpande, a convicted serial killer responsible for eight murders. Yet, in the end, this crime-thriller boils down to just that – a show content with presenting Dixit in shades of grey.
A remake of the French series La Mante (2017), Mrs Deshpande is absurd almost from the start. It opens with a young Bollywood actor ordering “two Russians” over the phone before heading off to do drugs —-only to be murdered soon after, in a manner identical to a string of killings from 25 years ago. Two more murders follow in a similarly staged fashion, prompting commissioner Arun Khatri (an exceedingly stoic Priyanshu Chatterjee) to bring back Seema Deshpande (Dixit) to help track the serial killer now on the loose. The logic? Why not bring in the original to catch the copycat?
Deshpande agrees but only on one condition – that the probe must be led by an officer, Tejas Phadke (Siddharth Chandekar), her estranged son, who doesn’t remember her.
Even for a work of fiction, the premise is difficult to stomach. Why the Mumbai Police would need the help of a serial killer, convicted to life imprisonment, to catch another murderer is never convincingly justified. What makes matters worse are the scenarios staged around this implausible logic.
At one point, Deshpande appears to abet a suicide while under police watch, with no consequences. In another instance, she drugs the officers assigned to guard her and injures one of them in a manner eerily similar to her own killings. And yet, the Mumbai Police continues to place its trust in her.
Eventually, it becomes hard to tell whether the series is invested in Deshpande’s intelligence or in testing the audience’s patience.
For a crime thriller, Mrs Deshpande generates little urgency in finding who the copycat killer is. Instead, it is more invested in framing Deshpande as a vigilante criminal — one who targets only bad people, as if it never fully trusts that the audience would be able to accept Dixit in that light.
Female rage could have been an interesting territory to explore. But the series never probes Deshpande’s psyche with real depth, flattening her violence into a familiar tale of broken people and moral binaries, stripping her actions of complexity.
The writing is never as complex as it believes itself to be. The dialogues, in fact, are laughably flat. Many of the scenarios feel eerily familiar, like what we’ve long witnessed on shows like CID or Crime Patrol, only that those managed to generate far more interest.
“You were right, Tejas. I shouldn’t have trusted her,” the commissioner admits at one point, prompting only one response: exactly.
Much of the show rests on Dixit, who remains mysterious but never quite terrifying enough for a serial killer. There is little real menace in her presence; in fact, she is almost too nice to inhabit a character meant to inspire fear convincingly. And it’s a miss — particularly because an actor of her calibre is finally given a markedly different character to portray, one that could have been compelling, but ends up being a missed opportunity.
As for the actors, the performances are uniformly flat, as if mirroring the writing itself.
In the end, Mrs Deshpande is easily skippable. And if you’re watching it for Dixit alone, it is likely to test both your patience and your intelligence more than once.
Film: Mrs Deshpande
Director: Nagesh Kukunoor
Cast: Madhuri Dixit, Kenneth Desai, Umakant Patil, Pradeep Velankar, Hardik Soni
Rating: 1.5/5
