Maa Behen

Screenwriter: Pooja Tolani

Director: Suresh Triveni

Cast: Madhuri Dixit, Triptii Dimri, Dharna Durga, Ravi Kishan, Geetanjali Kulkarni, Shardul Bhardwaj, Arunoday Singh, Jatin Sarna

An interesting and clever film about a middle-aged widow who accidentally kills a neighbour and calls her daughters home to help hide the body. What follows is part crime comedy, part family drama, and part commentary on the labels society assigns to women.

What interested me most, however, wasn’t the plot itself. It was the screenplay’s craft—how it chooses its point of view, how it slips exposition into drama, and how confidently it trusts its audience. While not every emotional arc lands with equal force, Maa-Behen offers several valuable lessons in screenwriting.

What works for the film –

1. Film’s gaze

Rather than lecturing society on what’s wrong with it, Maa-Behen adopts society’s gaze as its own. It looks at its characters and their actions through the same judgmental lens that their neighbourhood does. More interestingly, that gaze doesn’t stop at the colony gates. Even in the privacy of their home, the women often look at one another through the language society has handed them. Mothers and daughters accuse each other using labels they themselves have inherited, as if society quietly dictates not just how we see others, but also how we see ourselves.

What I particularly liked is that the film doesn’t rush to absolve Rekha (Madhuri Dixit) of the labels attached to her. She neither passionately rejects them in private nor defiantly owns them in public. She lives with them the way most people live with years of judgment—silently, until silence is no longer possible.

The screenplay’s smartest use of this gaze comes through Gupta ji’s death. Rekha narrates how he died three times over the course of the film. The first time, her daughters—Jaya (Triptii Dimri) and Sushma (Dharna Durga)—don’t believe her. Neither do we. And that’s precisely the point. Nothing in her account changes when she repeats it in the climax; the details remain exactly the same. What changes is our gaze. By then, the film has slowly shifted us from society’s perspective to Rekha’s. We realise she had been telling the truth all along. It’s a clever writing choice that doesn’t just tell us about prejudice—it quietly makes us participate in it.

• Embedding exposition into the drama

One of the screenplay’s biggest strengths is how effortlessly it hides exposition inside ongoing scenes. Apart from the opening setup, the film rarely pauses to explain who these people are or how they’re related. We discover relationships, histories and dynamics while the story is already moving forward—through conflicts, gossip, accusations and casual conversations.

As a writer, I know how tempting it is to stop the narrative and “clarify” information for the audience. The fear is always the same: What if they miss something? Maa-Behen trusts its audience enough to resist that temptation, and the screenplay benefits from it. Up until the midpoint, almost every scene manages to do two jobs at once—advance the murder cover-up while quietly filling in the characters’ histories and relationships.

An interesting exception is Khalballi, whose sensational news bulletins deliberately interrupt the narrative to tell us about the characters’ pasts. But even these don’t function as conventional exposition. They serve a dual purpose. They are funny, almost theatrical in their presentation, while simultaneously reinforcing one of the film’s central ideas—that society rarely narrates a person’s life with empathy. It reduces people to headlines, rumours and labels. In that sense, even the exposition is written from the film’s larger point of view.

Many other craft choices quietly work in the film’s favour. The entire cast, especially Madhuri Dixit and the two daughters, ground the story beautifully. They resist the glamour and heightened performance that often accompany women-led mainstream films, instead embracing the language, accent and everyday demeanour of the world they inhabit.

The film also has a delightful obsession with naming. Characters, the colony, the wine shop—almost nothing feels arbitrarily named. Each name carries a touch of humour, irony or social commentary, making even these seemingly small choices feel like an extension of the screenplay.

The edit deserves a special mention. Although the narrative is driven by a murder cover-up, it constantly returns to the larger ecosystem of the colony—the mehendi ceremony, the mata ki chowki, the neighbour peeping into other’s lives. These intercuts ensure that the story never loses sight of its real backdrop: a society that is always watching. Without them, Maa-Behen could easily have become just another crime comedy confined to a single household.

What I appreciated most, however, is the film’s refusal to preach. It never sets itself the impossible task of reforming society or redeeming every character outside its central family. The neighbours don’t suddenly become kinder, nor does the colony collectively discover empathy. The film understands that society rarely changes overnight. Its real concern is subtler—and perhaps more honest. It asks whether the women can stop seeing themselves through society’s gaze. That shift, inward rather than outward, gives the ending its quiet strength.

What may have worked better –

1. Want Vs Need

Every memorable protagonist is usually chasing two things. The want is external—it drives the plot. The need is internal—it transforms the character. A screenplay becomes emotionally richer when the two keep colliding until the climax.

Maa-Behen defines Rekha’s want with admirable clarity. From almost the first act, we know exactly what she is trying to achieve: get rid of Gupta ji’s body without getting caught. That objective keeps the narrative tight, urgent and consistently engaging.

Her need, however, remains less certain. At different moments, the screenplay hints at two emotional voids. One is her longing for companionship, brought out through Sushma’s father. The other—and arguably the stronger one—is her need to free herself from society’s judgment and stop measuring herself through its labels.

The problem is that neither strand receives enough narrative space. The companionship track appears unexpectedly and disappears almost as quickly, leaving little emotional residue. The second doesn’t fully emerge until the climax. By the time Rekha begins confronting society’s gaze, the film is already wrapping up its plot, leaving very little room for us to live through that transformation with her.

As a result, the screenplay’s want keeps the story moving, but the need rarely shapes it, making Rekha’s character feel flat at times. Rekha certainly arrives at a different emotional place by the end, but we don’t witness enough of the gradual internal shifts that make such change feel inevitable. The climax tells us she has changed; the journey doesn’t always let us experience that change.

Had the screenplay woven her need more consistently into the narrative spine, the murder cover-up would not just have been a clever plot engine—it would also have become the vehicle through which Rekha slowly reclaimed herself. The destination remains satisfying; it’s the emotional road leading to it that feels shorter than it could have been.

• The sisters remain plot-rich, but emotionally light

A similar pattern extends to the daughters, Jaya and Sushma. The screenplay is very clear about what each of them wants, both within the murder cover-up and in their personal lives. Their objectives are easy to understand, and they each contribute meaningfully to the plot.

What remains less explored is why those wants matter so deeply to them.

With Jaya, the film offers at least an emotional resolution. Through the course of the story, she comes to recognise the reality of her relationship with her husband, and that arc gives her journey a sense of completion.

Sushma, however, doesn’t receive the same emotional attention. We understand her role in the story, but do not come to realise what her internal need is. Her choices keep the narrative moving, yet they rarely reveal a deeper internal conflict.

This is perhaps the trade-off the film consciously makes. By keeping its focus on the murder cover-up, it maintains an impressive pace and narrative momentum. But that efficiency comes at a cost. Somewhere along the way, the screenplay sacrifices opportunities to build a deeper emotional connection with its supporting characters. They remain memorable for what they do more than for who they become.

• Equation between the sisters

One of the film’s strengths is the flashback that establishes Jaya and Sushma’s childhood. We see an elder sister instinctively looking after the younger one, and in just a few moments the film gives their bond warmth and history. It makes us believe that, before everything else, they were sisters (not step-sisters).

Which is why the conflict between them carries emotional weight. Jaya’s husband becoming involved with Sushma isn’t merely a romantic complication; it fractures the love and trust the sisters had.

However, their reconciliation doesn’t receive the same narrative attention. It arrives as part of the film’s larger resolution, almost getting absorbed into the many loose ends the climax is tying together. The conflict is resolved, but it doesn’t breathe on the screen.

Even a brief, quieter moment between the two—away from the mechanics of the murder cover-up—could have made that reconciliation feel more earned. Because the emotional payoff should be proportional to the emotional investment.

As a screenplay, it is full of smart writing decisions that aspiring writers can learn from, especially in its handling of point of view, exposition and thematic consistency. My only wish was that the same confidence had extended a little further into the emotional journeys of its central characters. Had their inner transformations received the same attention as the wonderfully engineered plot, Maa-Behen could have become not just an entertaining film, but an emotionally unforgettable one.

—SM