A few years ago, the global cinephile community — the sort of people who compose their Letterboxd reviews even before a film has ended — was thrown headfirst into a heated debate. As far as these folks were concerned, this was a debate of presidential magnitude — the kind of debate that could make a disagreement about Marvel movies seem like a ‘kavi sammelan’ in Lucknow. The British magazine Sight & Sound, which compiles a list of the greatest films of all time every decade, had published its latest rankings. And for the first time ever, the Belgian film Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles — previously viewed as a favourite only in niche circles — had claimed the top spot, sneaking past perennial favourites such as Citizen Kane, Tokyo Story, and Vertigo.

In the opening moments of Arati Kadav’s Mrs, you’d be forgiven for mistaking the film as a gentle love story borne out of the great Indian arranged marriage. In Delhi, Richa (a standout Sanya Malhotra), a dancer, meets Diwakar (Nishant Dahiya), an educated gynaecologist and her prospective match for the first time. They exchange glances and share smiles and then end up holding hands on a date at a neighbourhood restaurant. She lets him know that she’s crazy about cassata and he tells her that he’s a fan of “simple, home-cooked food.” Two cuts later, they’re married. It’s as happy as happiness can get.

Arati Kadav’s Mrs. – an official remake of Jeo Baby’s The Great Indian Kitchen (2021) – is a technically sound film. It opens with a montage of delicacies being cooked in an average Indian kitchen. Editor Prerna Saigal cuts the meticulous preparation of each dish with a carefully choreographed piece, drawing our attention to the ‘dance’ most women have to endure inside a household, to keep it on its axis. Scored by Sagar Desai featuring sounds from everyday life (like squeaky, rusted gate offering rhythm to the track), the montage works well. But it can’t quite conjure the rhythm of Baby’s original film, which editor Francis Louis establishes in the never-ending loop of domestic labour thrust upon women. Especially inside a kitchen. Kadav, who broke out with imaginative Sci-Fi films (The Astronaut and His Parrot) using wide-eyed imagination to compensate for oppressive budgets, also constructs her latest venture with a similar amount of distance. The food photography is immaculate, the kitchen and the home look like they were built on a soundstage. Unlike Baby’s film, where both the kitchen as well as the home felt lived-in. When Richa (Sanya Malhotra) has to immerse her hand into a clogged sink to weed out the sediments at its bottom, it doesn’t feel as viscerally icky as Nimisha Vijayan’s character having to hand-pick the chewed-out bones thrown by her father-in-law and the husband, in the original film.

For those not in favour of remakes — I am one of them, considering most turn out to be a lazy copy-paste job — the decision to let go of Mrs because the memories of watching The Great Indian Kitchen are too sacrosanct, will not be unfounded. But Mrs is not just any other remake. It is a thriving, breathing, nuanced film in its own right. It is the kind of film that takes the best out of its source material and enhances it, setting itself in a socio-cultural context that is relevant and relatable. Mrs hits hard — just as hard as The Great Indian Kitchen did when it released at the tail-end of the first wave of the pandemic. The Malayalam film with a seemingly simple story of a newly-married woman struggling to fit into a conservative and patriarchal household, ignited conversations around gender roles, casual sexism, toxic relationships, male entitlement and a woman’s role in a world she is constantly stereotyped in. It became a mirror of the suffering that most Indian women, at some time or maybe all of the time, have been subjected to. In that film, what remained subtle and innocuous at first finally boiled over into rage that resulted in a moment of gut-wrenching catharsis. Like the woman at the centre of it, we felt elated, but we also cried.

The distance between these two contradictory statements — the smell (khushboo) of the kitchen is sexy, and, you smell (baas) of the kitchen, do you expect me to be turned on — is measured by, who else, a man. The man who has deposited the woman he has married and brought to his home, where he lives with his parents, in the kitchen. Where she is expected to be an uncomplaining slave to everyone’s time and moods: the doctor husband who runs a clinic while constantly complaining of overwork, expecting his wife to serve ‘garam phulkas’ when he sits down to eat, the father-in-law wanting his slippers placed just so for him to slide his feet into, the mother-in-law using the sil-batta to grind the chutney, because the mixer-grinder is not loving enough.

The beauty of Sanya Malhotra’s latest Mrs lies in the little nuances in the screenplay. The film never fully spells out the issues, yet it’s the little moments, an expression here and a dialogue there that give out the message loud and clear. Making a remake of a critically acclaimed film comes with a huge amount of expectations. Mrs is based on 2021’s critically acclaimed Malayalam film The Great Indian Kitchen which had earned praise worldwide. The Malayalam film is still fresh in the minds of many, so making a Hindi version so soon may feel unnecessary. Yet, the Hindi language remake Mrs is an important film which speaks a universal language. Filmmaker Arati Kadav takes up the challenge and delivers a deeply impactful film that may resonate with many viewers personally.

Jeo Baby’s The Great Indian Kitchen was intended for theatrical release in 2021, but likely benefitted from the covid restrictions that resulted in a digital-only release. With everyone stuck inside, it was the right time for a film about the value of domestic work. It was one of the most acclaimed films that year, and it seemed only natural to hear some months later that the Malayalam film would be remade in Hindi. What was surprising to me, though, was the director attached to the project. Arati Kadav has directed one feature (Cargo, 2019) and a handful of shorts. A slim filmography, and yet she’s one of the most distinctive voices working in Hindi cinema today. Her work till now has tended towards science-fiction with a warm, handmade quality. A remake never seemed like the right use of her capacity for whimsy and invention, though I was curious to see what direction she might take Jeo Baby’s film. Having watched Mrs., I’m hoping this is Kadav’s ‘one for them’.