Directed by Mudassar Aziz, whose previous work includes mildly entertaining relationship dramas such as Happy Bhag Jayegi (2016) and Khel Khel Mein (2024), Mere Husband Ki Biwi is exactly like its title. It barters common sense for quirk, ends up with neither. Not just weird, the title is also incorrect. This film is not about a man married to two women at the same time, like David Dhawan’s 1998 film Gharwali Baharwali.
It’s about Ankur (Arjun Kapoor), a Delhi realtor, whose ex-wife Prabhleen (Bhumi Pednekar) reappears in his life just as he decides to move on with Antara (Rakul Preet Singh). The film wants you to believe that it’s a rom-com. There is a light sprinkling of romance but Mere Husband Ki Biwi’s idea of funny is so unfunny, it’s pathetic.
Sample this: Ankur finds his father, played by a painfully typecast Shakti Kapoor, “enjoying” at a friend’s bachelor party. When he chides him for flirting shamelessly with women probably younger than Ankur, the father asks him to not spoil his mood, ending the sentence with “tujhe teri mummy ki kasam”. This happens right at the beginning of the film. It made me think that maybe Ankur’s father is a widower. But no. The mother is very much alive and becomes a part of the scenery in several scenes as the story unfolds. Not just this, Israel-Palestine and Russia-Ukraine are mentioned at least twice in the film for laughs.
At 144 minutes, Mere Husband Ki Biwi will give you ample opportunities for eye-rolls. It is 2025 but the film is stuck in the awful Eighties. Prabhleen suffers from a partial memory loss at a time most inconvenient as if on cue. She and Antara—the first a journalist, the other a physiotherapist—lose their marbles over a man so silly, it makes you think of all the rot that is showing up everywhere but especially in Hindi films. No amount of rejigging popular songs, European locations, Badshah-coded club numbers, flamboyant proposals or last-minute runs to the airport can hide it anymore.
What makes it worse is that Mudassar Aziz teases you with what this film could have been—a nuanced exploration of all that follows the happily ever after. Mere Husband Ki Biwi could have been a layered exploration of the woes of an ill-matched couple exacerbated by stubborn need to cause damage as a coping mechanism. But instead of presenting the varied, entangled complexities of a modern marriage, it reduces Ankur and Prableen’s vagaries to caricature.
Despite Prabhleen being a more caustic version of Jab We Met’s Geet, Bhumi Pednekar succeeds in making the part her own. However, it’s the writing that lets her down. We have had several memorable, unpredictable, flawed female characters—Cocktail’s Veronica, played by a blistering Deepika Padukone comes instantly to mind—but Prabhleen is so unevenly written that despite her many catastrophes, it’s difficult to root for her.
You don’t root for Antara either. Rakul Preet Singh is gorgeous. If only the film did half as good a job of building her character as it has with her makeup and clothes. Apart from Shakti Kapoor, Mere Husband Ki Biwi also entirely wastes other supporting characters including Kanwaljit Singh and Dino Morea, whose brief I’m guessing was to look rich and suave. After Tu Jhoothi Main Makkaar (2023), we have a stand-up comic playing the hero’s best friend once more. Harsh Gujral is a less offensive, more tolerable version of Anubhav Singh Bassi. That’s high praise. As for Arjun Kapoor, another middling performance in a perfectly forgettable film.
(Edited by : Anand Singha)
