Mom

There is no denying in the fact that the first 45 minutes of Sridevi starrer Mom is heart wrenching. Director Ravi Udyawar manages to pull off this key phase of the movie in a very brutal way almost making us take our eyes away from the screen. But the issue with Mom is its detour to the usual formula we see in these kinds of women justice/ revenge dramas and its end up in a very dull way.

Devki is a biology teacher who has a step daughter. The relationship between the two isn’t that smooth as the daughter is yet to accept her as a mother. So on one Valentine’s Day after a party, Devki’s stepdaughter Arya goes missing and on further investigation it gets revealed that she was assaulted physically. The movie is about a mother’s journey to provide justice to her daughter when the judiciary failed to do so.

One brilliant film that came out recently that dealt with women safety was Pink. The beauty of that movie was that instead of creating an all is well climax kind of a film, Shoojit Sircar used the platform to rip off the mindset that was there in almost everyone. Looking at the stellar cast of Mom, I genuinely thought that they would dwell in to the theme in some unique way. But after that pivotal first 45 minutes, everything becomes way too easy to guess. The kind of customized justice idea that we see in most Shankar films gets repeated here and it fails to build intrigue. There is a court trial sequence in the film which looks very amateurish and too breezy. And at the end of that 10 minutes sequence, the film shows us two of the key male protagonists’ sort of behaving like a frustrated common man. When you show such emotions on these characters without showing us much content in understanding them, there won’t be any impact on the viewer.

Sridevi delivers a stellar performance as Devki. While she gracefully became that stepmother who was yet to find a connect with her daughter, it was those scenes where she breaks down that created much more impact. The switch on/ switch off actress became the character and delivered her best. In that fake looking bald headed prosthetic look, what Nawazuddin Siddiqui manages to add to the movie are some bits of natural humor.  There wasn’t a need for someone like Nawazuddin to play that character. Similar was the case with Akshay Khanna who is there through out, but still looks like a 15 minutes long character whose purpose we all knew from the beginning itself. Sajal Ali plays the role of Arya convincingly and Adnan Siddiqui was fine as the father.

Ravi Udywar gives us some promise in the beginning of the movie and then he takes the movie in to the usual revenge drama zone. When the story takes a turn that you hoped it won’t take, the disappointment is bigger. The second half has Mom, going after the culprits and there also we have very minimal amounts of surprises. And it is weird how Akshay Khanna’s character is numb at the beginning and suddenly becomes so proactive in the second half.  If Sridevi wasn’t there, it would have been immensely difficult for this movie to touch the hearts of the audience. The visuals sort of go along with the mood of the film. AR Rahman has composed the songs and we get to hear only the lullaby in the film.

Mom goes through all the twists and turns one can clearly interpret without much thinking. The spectacular performance of Sridevi clearly helps the movie in delivering the emotion, but the least surprising writing pulls it back.

Rating: 2.5/5