There is a specific kind of loud, desperate noise that only a mid-budget Hindi comedy can make when it realizes nobody is laughing, and Mister Mummy hits that frequency about four minutes in and just stays there. Riteish Deshmukh plays a grumpy physical education teacher who somehow gets pregnant through a medical anomaly that the script brushes past with the urgency of someone running for a train they already missed. Genelia Deshmukh plays his estranged wife, a school principal with a permanent expression of mild annoyance that feels entirely justified under the circumstances. If I'm honest, the whole premise belongs in a discarded twenty-page treatment from the nineteen-nineties that someone found at the bottom of a filing cabinet and decided to shoot on a Tuesday. The director, Shaad Ali, has made movies about quirky couples before, most notably Saathiya, which feels like it was directed by a completely different human being who possessed both patience and a working knowledge of human emotion. Here, every scene is lit like an airport waiting area and edited with the frantic energy of an afternoon television ad for laundry detergent. The screenplay relies almost entirely on people yelling at each other about bellies, nausea, and awkward doctor appointments, as if volume alone could substitute for actual jokes or genuine situations. Mahesh Manjrekar and Ila Arun show up as various medical professionals and eccentric elders, shouting their lines with the kind of professional exhaustion that suggests their paychecks cleared before they stepped onto the soundstage. Rakesh Bedi gets a few moments to look confused near a hospital corridor, though his character exists mainly to provide expositional speedbumps whenever the narrative threatens to stall out completely. It is a small thing, but it bugged me how the boom mic dips into the upper corner of the frame during three separate emotional conversations in the kitchen, casting a lazy shadow over the actors' foreheads while nobody behind the camera apparently noticed or cared. The cinematography by Himman Dhamija captures every suburban street and hospital ward with a flat, digital harshness that strips away any warmth, making even the colorful costumes look dusty and tired under the relentless lights. Bollywood movies have certainly done worse things with high-concept absurdity, yet very few of them manage to feel quite this heavy while dealing with a plot that literally floats away on a breeze of total nonsense.

Riteish Deshmukh spends the first half of the runtime wearing a prosthetic stomach that appears to have been manufactured from leftover foam packaging and sheer bad intentions, shifting its shape from scene to scene in a way that suggests continuity was entirely optional. His performance consists mostly of clutching his lower back and making faces that are supposed to indicate morning sickness but often land somewhere closer to mild indigestion after eating a stale samosa. Genelia does her best to anchor the chaos, but she is lumbered with dialogue that requires her to explain the joke immediately after telling it, killing whatever comic timing might have squeaked through the cracks. There is an unmistakable disconnect between the actors and the material, as if everyone on set realized on day three that the central gag was already running on fumes. The background score by Amar Mohile treats every single instance of male pregnancy like a catastrophic national emergency, laying down thick, pounding synth beats over shots of someone trying to sit down on a sofa. Hindi films have a long and honorable tradition of broad physical comedy where men dress up or pretend to be pregnant, dating all the way back through decades of regional farce, but those older efforts usually understood the value of escalation. Mister Mummy just repeats the same three visual gags about cravings and mood swings until your brain turns to oatmeal, refusing to find a new angle or a sharper punchline. The editing by Rameshwar S. Bhagat lets reaction shots linger three beats too long, draining the energy right out of every conversational ping-pong match before the next person speaks. It is difficult to care about the reconciliation arc between the bickering couple when the movie itself seems actively bored by their emotional journey, rushing through the sentimental beats just to get back to another scene where someone falls over a piece of furniture. Rakesh Bedi and Ila Arun try to inject some stage-trained vigor into the proceedings, yet they are constantly fighting against a tone that shifts wildly between cartoon slapstick and melodramatic domestic dispute without warning. You find yourself watching the background extras instead of the leads, tracking the guy in the blue shirt who walks past the same grocery store window four times in a single sequence.

The soundtrack is a collection of forgettable tracks that arrive with the subtlety of a falling piano, interrupting the narrative flow just when it needs to build some momentum. One particular romantic track plays three separate times in the first hour, once as a montage, once as a background hum during a serious talk, and once as an instrumental cue while someone buys fruit. That kind of repetition usually points toward a desperate shortage of musical material or an editorial suite running out of hours before a locked delivery date. The thematic ambitions of the script are murky at best, gesturing vaguely toward modern gender roles and changing domestic expectations before instantly backing away from anything resembling a real observation to make another joke about gas. There is an attempt to say something about shared parenthood and the physical toll of bringing a child into the world, but it gets buried under so many layers of broad mugging and CGI stomach ripples that you would need an archaeological shovel to find it. This is where the lack of conviction hurts the most, because a truly committed farce can get away with almost any level of stupidity if the performers look like they believe in the universe they are inhabiting. Here, nobody looks convinced, least of all the director, who seems to be pointing the camera at whatever is standing closest and hoping the final cut somehow edits itself during post-production. It sits in that strange, gray space where commercial entertainment meets creative exhaustion, offering neither the sharp satire it occasionally flirts with nor the innocent joy of old-school family dramas. The supporting cast does what they can with roles that were clearly written on the back of an envelope, but even veterans like Mahesh Manjrekar look stranded in scenes that go nowhere and mean nothing. By the time the final credits start scrolling over a blooper reel that features actors forgetting their lines, you are simply grateful for the silence that follows the last loud chord of the background score.