Black Widows – Mystery spoiled by forced humour

Zee 5 has come up with its latest offering Black Widows, starring Mona Singh, Shamita Shetty and Swastika Mukherjee. A remake of Finnish show Mustat lesket, the show is a dark comedy about three women who are in an abused marriage and kill their husbands to get out of it.

Plot

Black widow is the story of 3 wives, Veera (Mona Singh) Kavita (Shamita Shetty) and Jayati (Swastika Mukherjee). Their husbands are business partners and dont treat the ladies with dignity. 

Jayati’s husband Lalit (Mohan Kapoor) beats her regularly, Radhika’s husband Nilesh sends her to his business contacts to get his deals sorted, whereas Veera is scared that her husband Jatin (Sharad Kelkar) can hurt her daughter because of his anger issues.

One fine day, when all the couples are out at lakehouse to celebrate Lalit’s 50th birthday, the ladies execute their plan by blasting the boat on which the men were out drinking and the men die.

Enter inspector Pankaj Mishra (Parambrata Chatterjee) and his associate Rinku for the investigation. Once the investigation starts new subplots keep on adding to the narrative. 

This gets linked to a pharma company Medipharma, headed by Inaya Thakur (Raima Sen), which is doing human trials of a potential vaccine in a village, and a lot of villagers start disappearing.

On the other hand Jatin survives the blast and returns adding another subplot to the story. Director also throws in Eddie (Aamir Ali) as Veera’s love interest, Jehan (Nitin Bhambri) as Lalit’s son and Inspector Bhola (Faisal Malik) to keep the story going.

The rest of the story deals with the investigation, do the women get away with the murders, and what is the larger conspiracy regarding the vaccine trials.

The Hits

Black Widows has a very good show to refer to, has an interesting plot and a decent cast, along with quite good production values.

Background music of the show is very good and so is the editing. Some of the sequences are comically good but they are very few and far in between.

Performances from Swastika and Shamita are very good, along with the dependable Sharad Kelkar.

The Misses

The show which starts with a promise, quite soon suffers due to lazy making and  loose storytelling. What could have been a fun murder mystery, doesn’t take itself seriously and loses both the fun and the mystery.

Other than Swastika Mukherjee and Sharad Kelkar the performances are very average at the best, with only exception of Shamita Shetty who nails it as dumb and childish Radhika.

The biggest problem with Black Widows is that whenever it gets into the mystery or suspense zone, the impact gets diluted with needless comic sequences. 

Some to mention, the ladies talking loudly about murder even when police is nearby, or being the cliched excuses “ladies wala samaan” seems too kiddish in such show.

Black Widows is 12 episodes long with 30+ mins per episode. This show is at least 3-4 episodes too long which adds to the agony.

Performances

As mentioned above Black Widows has a pretty good cast but still director has failed to utilise its actors effectively. 

Swastika Mukherjee as Jayati and Shamita Shetty as Radhika are very good and perfectly fit the bill. So does Sharad Kelkar as Jatin.

A big disappointment is Parambrata Chattopadhyay as Inspector Pankaj Mishra, who despite his body of work gives a very weak performance in a weird written role. Raima Sen as Inaaya looks beautiful but her act doesn’t add to anything.

Mona Singh as Veera is not at all effective and so are the other actors. 

FFC Take

In a nutshell, Black Widows had an interesting premise, good starcast and a very good show as reference. This was a perfect recipe for a thrilling dark comedy which is let down by some lazy direction and bad acting.

Had the runtime been a bit shorter and a bit more serious approach to the mystery part this could have been a very good show. But that was not to be and Black Widows ends up as a disappointment.