Mrs Serial Killer (Netflix)
Starring Jacqueline Fernandez, Manoj Bajpayee, Mohit Raina, Zayn Marie
Written, Directed and Original Music by Shirish Kunder
Rating: *
Among the many worsts that this Netflix atrocity has to offer, there is the worst dialogue I’ve heard in recent times spoken by the very brave actor Mohit Raina.
“I was surprised when my sister visited a gynecologist since she was kunwari,” deadpans Raina.
Now, kunwari can be taken to mean either a virgin or unmarried. Both ways, this sucks big time.
Ditto the film. The insufferable pretentious puerile garbage from Shirish Kunder, the self-styled genius who thinks the sun rises and sets according to his (self-declared) wisdom, Mrs Serial Killer is the kind of self-consciously lurid thriller that must have sounded like Bollywood’s own version of the grisly Korean masterpiece, I Saw The Devil on paper. I can see Manoj (Bajpayee), Jacqueline (Fernandez) and Mohit dancing around the dining table after the narration while Farah Khan cooked up her own thing in the kitchen.
Devil be damned, I saw Kunder’s film. And my life will never be the same again. In these desperate times for movie addicts like me, Kunder has provided just the antidote for my addiction. Mrs Serial Killer is not just an awful film, it is so proud of its awfulness that it may leave viewers emotionally battered and wounded for a while.
Jacqueline Fernandez braving her way through an absurd role and wading through a Hindi accent that made me wonder if her character is supposed to be a foreigner plays Manoj Bajpayee’s distraught wife. Her husband is in the cooler for bumping off unmarried pregnant women. In a town that resembles a small hill station, I wondered how many of those (unmarried, pregnant) women would a serial killer find? Perhaps he could have moved to Brazil and spared us this film.
Fernandez hits on a bizarre plan to save her husband’s ass (along with the rest of him). She kidnaps a woman (pregnant and unmarried) and decides to kill her so the law (always an ass) would think her husband innocent. Genius at work.
The plan, in keeping with everything else in this corny concoction of blood and buffoonery, is horribly botched. By the time the film chugs to its atrociously exaggerated climax in the basement of a hospital, we are as distraught as Ms Fernandez who looks like she has just seen a bat in her house during the lockdown. Bajpayee smirks and hams through a role that is as thankless as it is witless.
I did see Mohit Raina trying to take his role seriously. He failed, of course.No talent no matter how big can withstand the torrent of asininity that Shirish Kunder unleashes on us. A word to Netflix. Do they really think we are so desperate for new films that we would sit through this super-twisted take on a twisted mind? During the climax, Manoj compares the film to his namesake’s The Sixth Sense. We hear you, Manoj. We can’t stop laughing.
