Konkona Sen Sharma drops a piece of toast on a chipped kitchen counter and leaves it there, and that small bit of kitchen mess tells you more about her marriage than the dialogue ever does. Alankrita Shrivastava wants her camera in the sticky corners of Bhopal where the wallpaper is peeling from humidity and every closed door hides a muffled argument about money or modesty or both. If I'm honest, the first twenty minutes feel a bit cluttered with characters who are all itching to break out of their clothes in one way or another, scrambling for space in a narrative that threatens to burst its seams before it even settles into a rhythm. You have young women swiping on lipstick in public bathrooms while hiding behind heavy denim jackets, older women watching softcore porn on cracked tablets behind closed lace curtains, and college girls posting selfies while pretending to be someone they are not online. The screenplay juggles these four distinct lives with varying degrees of grace, sometimes pausing too long on a reaction shot of a sneering brother-in-law or letting a confrontation drag out past the point of dramatic necessity. It is the kind of storytelling that wants to grab you by the shoulders and shake some sense into you about the state of modern womanhood in small-town India, occasionally forgetting that subtlety often leaves a deeper bruise than a loud confrontation.

Ratna Pathak Shah anchors the entire enterprise as a widowed aunt living out a secret second youth through phone sex conversations with a swimming coach who calls her 'Rosie.' Her performance has a dry, observational sharpness that keeps the movie from sliding entirely into melodrama, finding humor in the absurdity of a conservative household where desire is treated like a contagion. She carries herself with a rigid dignity that makes her late-night phone calls feel intensely private, almost painful to watch, as if we are intruding on something we have no business seeing. Opposite her, Aahana Kumra plays a beautician dreaming of a life in Delhi with her fiancé, chewing on plastic pen caps and snapping at customers when the pressure mounts. Kumra has a restless physical energy, darting around cramped beauty parlors and motorcycle seats with a fierce urgency that makes her desperation palpable even when the script asks her to hit the same rebellious notes a few times too often. It reminds me a bit of Seema Biswas in 'Water,' that same coiled defiance under the weight of suffocating social expectations, though Shrivastava leans much harder into contemporary pop culture markers to signal rebellion. There is a supporting actor playing a local photographer who is clearly dubbed by someone else in a sound booth five states away, and every time he opens his mouth the illusion of these dusty, sun-baked Bhopal streets drops for a split second, which is a small thing that just bugged me every single time he appeared.

The cinematography by Akshay Singh keeps the frame tight and claustrophobic, shooting through doorways and mosquito nets so you constantly feel the physical presence of other people breathing down the necks of these women. Sunlight hits the dusty rooms in hazy, ochre streaks, making the heat of the city practically radiate off the screen while the characters sweat through their cotton kurtas and synthetic lingerie. Zeb Zuberi’s editing has this choppy, rhythmic quality that cuts abruptly from a domestic screaming match to a quiet, solitary moment on a rooftop, refusing to let the audience sit comfortably with any single emotion for too long. Zebar's background score leans heavily on recurring acoustic motifs that sometimes overstate the emotional stakes, telling us how to feel just when the actors are already doing the heavy lifting with their eyes. You notice these mechanical seams more because the film is constantly pushing against the traditional boundaries of Hindi movies, trying to find a visual vocabulary for internal yearnings that usually get flattened out into broad moral lessons or conservative cautionary tales.

Desire here is not a poetic abstraction or a grand romantic sweep, but a messy, transactional, and occasionally pathetic impulse that gets tangled up in cheap cosmetics and stolen moments behind stairwells. These women are not saints or martyrs, and Shrivastava refuses to grant them the easy nobility that Bollywood movies usually bestow upon female characters who suffer quietly for their families. They are petty, they lie to their parents, they steal small sums of money from purses left on kitchen tables, and they make terrible choices regarding men who are clearly not worth the trouble. That messiness is where the film finds its pulse, dodging the trap of becoming a tidy political statement about oppression and instead presenting a messy knot of domestic friction that resists any simple ideological framing. When the stories finally collide, the narrative mechanics get a bit creaky, forcing coincidences that feel constructed rather than earned by the characters' individual trajectories through the city.

There is a specific kind of bravery in making a film about female masturbation and marital rape that doesn't dress itself up in arthouse pretension, choosing instead to use the bright colors and pop music aesthetics of mainstream cinema to smuggle in ideas that usually terrify mainstream producers. It doesn't quite manage to balance all four narrative threads without letting a few of them sag in the middle stretch, particularly the college girl storyline which relies on well-worn tropes about internet deception and youthful rebellion. Yet the sheer audacity of its central premise keeps you hooked through the uneven pacing and the heavy-handed symbol of the lipstick itself, which turns up in pockets and purses like a ticking bomb waiting to go off. You leave the theater thinking less about the grand social commentary and more about the specific way Ratna Pathak Shah pauses before dialing a phone number, knowing full well the trouble it will bring to her door, and doing it anyway.