Mere Husband Ki Biwi review: A guide on how not to make a film!

There’s nothing funny or even remotely entertaining about Arjun Kapoor, Bhumi Pednekar and Rakul Preet Singh starrer Mere Husband Ki Biwi. Here’s why!

Mere Husband Ki Biwi review: There’s a reason why people are hesitating to go to the cinemas today. Logic completely seems to be missing in big feature films, and that’s starting to get more concerning with each movie that comes out every Friday. Mudassar Aziz’s Mere Husband Ki Biwi is as bizarre as its title sounds. At first, I was embarrassed to just say the title out loud to people who asked me which film I’d be watching this week. But after watching the film, the title is actually the least of the issues this film has. 

To give you a gist of the story, it revolves around three people- Ankur (Arjun Kapoor) who was married to Prabhleen (Bhumi Pednekar) and post their divorce, has a new love interest, Antara (Rakul Preet Singh). Ankur falls in love with Antara but has these sudden episodes that remind him of his past. Thinking that it’s unprocessed trauma, Antara asks him about it. Here’s when he starts narrating the story of his first marriage, which apparently haunts him to this day. Ankur and Prabhleen get attracted to each other and fall in love (in the most problematic way ever). The next thing you know they’re married and are trying to build a happy home for themselves. But Ankur is resentful of Prabhleen’s career and wants her to pay more attention at home and fluff his parents’ ego whenever needed. 

There’s constant bickering between the two but they still somehow have the hope to make it work. Until a tragedy strikes, and Ankur blames it all on Prabhleen yet again. Frustrated by his constant judgement and anger towards her, Prabhleen takes a rather drastic step in their relationship which leads to their divorce eventually. When Ankur snaps out his flashback story, the alarming part isn’t even the story itself; it’s the fact that Antara not once took a step back and thought Ankur was the actual red flag in all of this. You would think the movie is showing him to be so regressive to prove him to be in a bad light, but you eventually realise they aren’t self-aware about this at all. Ankur, his family, both his love interests and the makers do not once bat an eye to the fact that he is a man-child. Instead, they keep him on a pedestal like he is that one-in-a-million chance they should be looking out for.

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This movie has every problematic and done and dusted trope that we fight against today and somehow all of this is supposed to be funny. The hero thinks he can do no wrong and the woman should have adjusted. Both the women are constantly pitted against each other in this film. They play cheap tricks on one and another, just to win over a man. There’s of course an abundance of sleazy jokes and songs that are equally underwhelming. And while they have tried to touch upon taboo topics like divorce and remarriage, the poor execution of it all just makes you not want to take the film seriously. No matter what happens, either of the women are blamed for it, Ankur doesn’t even bother retrospecting that he is the root cause of it all. There's also a sudden plot twist about a memory loss and at that point the film feels like an extended version of a Hindi serial. Bhumi Pednekar was last seen in Netflix’s Bhakshak for which she garnered a lot of praise, and Arjun Kapoor was all people could talk about post Singham Again. So to see them both giving a subpar performance in this one was rather disappointing. 

There have been love triangles in Bollywood before. There has also been ‘the other woman’ trope in quite a few films like ‘Pati Patni aur Woh’ and ‘Govinda Naam Mera’ and co-incidentally both the films star Bhumi Pednekar. Knowing that she is capable of so much more, maybe she gives these third wheeling characters a rest. There’s also Luv Ranjan’s formula of making two people compete for one person. Mere Husband Ki Biwi which is a mixture of all of this and just leaves you wondering what you just saw and why! There’s also an Aditya Seal and Dino Morea cameo that randomly happens mid way but neither of them get good screen time nor do their characters have anything concrete to do in the film. It’s sad that this is the current state of Bollywood films, and this is what is termed as ‘entertainment’ today. The film is two hours twenty-three minutes long and with the short attention span that everyone has, I dare y’all not to fidget with your phones during the course of the movie. Mere Husband Ki Biwi is a cautionary warning that Bollywood needs to start re-inventing its stories before it's too late!

Mere Husband Ki Biwi is currently playing at a theatre near you!