Every Indian housing society has at least one CBI branch. It doesn’t have a badge, a budget or any legal authority, but it does have balcony access, unlimited free time, and a frightening commitment to gathering intelligence. Who came home late? Who is fighting with whom? Why was there a strange car parked outside? Why is that widow wearing sleeveless blouses again?
Netflix’s Maa Behen, directed by Suresh Triveni, takes that familiar ecosystem of gossip, judgment, and unsolicited surveillance and turns it into a dark comedy. When Rekha (Madhuri Dixit Nene) discovers her neighbour Charitra Kumar Gupta (Ravi Kishan) dead in her kitchen, her first instinct is not to call the police but her daughters. Triptii Dimri plays Jaya, a deeply unhappy housewife whose life seems to revolve around feeding the men in her family. Dharna Durga, a content creator in real life, is well cast in the role of Sushma, an aspiring influencer who has already been tried and convicted in the court of colony opinion. Together, the three women spend the film trying to deal with a corpse while dodging suspicious neighbours, awkward questions, and increasingly ridiculous situations.
What I enjoyed most about Maa Behen, however, is that it treats the murder mystery almost like a distraction. The film is far more interested in the stories that have been built around these women over the years. The first half largely introduces us to the women through the colony’s gaze. Rekha is the widow who smiles too much and wears sleeveless blouses for all the wrong reasons. Jaya is the woman who supposedly stole her husband from her best friend. Sushma is the shameless girl from the viral kissing video. The colony has already written their stories and filed them away as fact.
The second half slowly begins to fact-check those assumptions. Rekha wasn’t a temptress so much as a young widow who spent years dealing with unwanted attention and the suspicion that followed it. Jaya’s marriage emerges from circumstances far more complicated than the gossip suggests, while Sushma ends up carrying the blame for a video she didn’t even upload. What’s interesting is that it’s not just the neighbours who buy into these narratives. The women have internalised parts of them too, judging one another through the same lens society uses. As those versions begin to unravel, Maa Behen reveals three women are sometimes impulsive, occasionally frustrating, and entirely human, but far removed from the villains they’ve been made out to be.
The film’s sense of humour extends well beyond the dialogue. Rekha’s nemesis is named Charitra (character) Gupta. Her boss is Sanskaar (moral values) bhaiyya. The colony they reside in is called Adarsh Colony despite housing some seriously committed practitioners of character assassination and moral policing. Add the dramatic narration of Shrivardhan Trivedi (of Sansani fame)—which turns every neighbourhood misunderstanding into a national crisis—and Maa Behen often feels like it’s one step away from looking into the camera and saying: “You see what we did there, right?”
