Kajol drops the first f-bomb of the movie about three minutes in, and honestly, it feels less like a character choice and more like a sigh of relief. You can almost feel the decades of glossy, saccharine commercial Hindi films being physically shaken off her shoulders as she strides into frame in a heavy kanjeevaram saree paired with scuffed leather boots. That collision of traditional and abrasive sets the entire tone for Renuka Shahane’s Tribhanga, a Netflix release that attempts to tackle generational trauma without wrapping it in cotton wool or weeping violins. It is messy and it talks too fast and sometimes the sound mix makes the dialogue genuinely hard to parse over the clatter of kitchen utensils. But it stays in your head.

The screenplay sets up three generations of women in a sprawling, high-ceilinged Mumbai house that smells of old paper and bitter coffee. Nayantara is the matriarch, a celebrated Marathi author lying in a hospital bed on the verge of total paralysis after a stroke. Her daughter Anuradha is the volatile, foul-mouthed classical dancer played by Kajol with a kind of restless, coiled energy that occasionally threatens to break the furniture. Then there is Masha, the granddaughter played by Mithila Palkar, who sits quietly in the corner of every room trying desperately to fold herself into a shape that won't offend anyone. Shahane directs the domestic scenes with a documentary-style restlessness, using handheld cameras that track characters from narrow hallways into sunlit balconies without ever quite letting them settle. There are moments in these early sequences where the cross-cutting gets frantic, splicing together flashbacks of Nayantara’s youth with present-day hospital monitor beeps in a way that feels a bit like a student film project trying to cram three hours of plot into ninety minutes.

Kajol’s performance is the main engine driving this thing, operating on a frequency that is grating one second and heartbreaking the next. She screams, she gags on her own rage, she dances with a terrifying precision that looks less like art and more like an exorcism. It is a massive swing, the kind of raw, unvarnished acting we rarely see in contemporary Bollywood movies, where stars are usually too managed to let their faces contort into ugly expressions of genuine fury. Against her, Kunaal Roy Kapur plays Milan, the mild-mannered biographer recording Nayantara's life story, and he mostly exists to nod sympathetically and look slightly terrified whenever Kajol enters the room. It’s a thankless supporting role that requires him to stand in doorways while the women scream at each other, though he does manage to sell his exhaustion with a quiet slumped shoulder posture. Mithila Palkar has a much harder job as Masha, navigating dialogue that occasionally sounds like it was translated from a self-help manual, delivering lines about emotional boundaries with a placid sweetness that doesn't quite match the storm happening around her. Yet when she finally snaps at her mother in a hospital corridor, her voice drops an octave and you catch a flash of that same stubborn, inherited gene that makes Kajol so formidable.

The visual language shifts awkwardly between warm, sun-drenched flashbacks of the 1980s literary scene and the harsh, fluorescent glare of modern medical facilities. Cinematographer Bobby Singh loves a tight medium close-up, shoving the lens right into the actors' tear-stained faces during moments of emotional confession, which gets exhausting after the third or fourth crying jag. The soundtrack by Gaurav Chatterji leans heavily on acoustic guitars and swelling vocals during the dramatic beats, and there is one specific piano motif that repeats so often I started hearing it in my sleep long after the laptop screen went black. It’s a small production detail, but the ADR work on the street scenes outside the hospital is atrocious, featuring the exact same loop of a distant ambulance siren and street vendor shouts every single time characters step outside for a cigarette. These technical blemishes pull you right out of the narrative, reminding you that you are watching a heavily controlled streaming production rather than dropping in on a real family's breakdown.

What saves the picture from sinking into melodrama is its refusal to assign clear heroes and villains to this matrilineal bloodline. Nayantara is a brilliant writer who abandoned her children for her art, and the script doesn't excuse her cruelty or romanticize her bohemian independence. She looks down from her hospital pillows with eyes that remain sharp even as her body fails her, spitting out philosophical justifications for her selfishness that feel chillingly earned. When Anuradha rails against her mother for prioritizing typewriter keys over school lunches, you feel the specific, stinging resentment of a neglected child who grew up to be a difficult adult. It is a dynamic that recalls the complicated, toxic mother-daughter push-pull in A Suitable Boy, though stripped of the historical pageantry and reduced to the claustrophobia of modern urban apartments. These women do not forgive each other because the script demands a neat, heartwarming resolution for the credits. They reach a fragile, bruised truce based on the mutual recognition of how much damage they have inflicted upon one another across thirty years of silence.

There is a monologue near the end where Kajol explains the meaning of the film's title, referencing a classical Odissi dance pose that is bent at three distinct points, and the metaphor is hammered home with the subtlety of a falling anvil. It’s the kind of heavy-handed exposition that plagues so many Hindi films, as if the writers were terrified the audience wouldn't connect the physical contortions of the dance to the emotional fractures of the characters without a spoken roadmap. Yet even as the dialogue stumbles into preachiness during these final fifteen minutes, the sheer conviction in Kajol's eyes keeps the scene from capsizing entirely. She holds the frame with a commanding, ragged authority that makes you forgive the clunky symbolism and the overactive piano score. When the screen finally cuts to black without any grand moral pronouncement or sweeping wrap-up of future fates, you feel the relief of having survived a very long, very loud afternoon with people who refuse to be polite.