'Wonder Women' review: Anjali's weakest has heroes with half stories

Director Anjali Menon does manage to build a few genuinely warm segments, in true traditions of a writer who can whip up drama without trying too hard

Wonder Women

English (SonyLiv)

Director: Anjali Menon

Cast: Nithya Menen, Parvathy Thiruvothu, Padmapriya, Nadiya Moidu

Rating: 2/5

Wonder Women’, the latest from writer-director Anjali Menon, makes you wonder how it started, the idea. It is that kind of a film, nudging you on to these random distractions even through a short-ish, 80-minute run. What could have been the project pitch? Six pregnant women who meet at an antenatal care facility – that is a fairly promising brief, with enough to piece together a genre feel-gooder.

The title is a nice, if predictable, play on the heroic attributes of the film’s protagonists, played by Nithya Menen, Padmapriya, Amruta Subhash, Parvathy Thiruvothu, Sayanora Philip, and Archana Padmini. The pre-release run-up prepped you for the film; the ensemble cast, the theme, and the general vibe set you up for something that is familiar, yet comforting.

It should have worked, right? It does not, really, and it is not because the film offers something radically different from what it promised. It just makes the starts on all that is expected, leaves them hanging, and drifts on through cliches, convenient plot turns and quick resolutions.

The initial aloofness of Mini (Parvathy), for instance. She is at the centre, run by Nandita (Nadiya Moidu), after a messy breakup and is grappling with the idea of being a single mother. All you get of her backstory are the bits thrown in from a phone call but you know that this front, of the withdrawn outsider, would soon break into tenderness. This is a problem with Wonder Women. You always know where it is going.

The film’s duration does not allow for the characters to take form. The writing does not go much beyond hurried introductions; some of them play like Twitter bios with set attributes – like Saya (Sayanora), Goan, singer, free spirit. Unlike in ‘Ustad Hotel’ and ‘Bangalore Days’, which she also directed, Menon does not really engage with her characters here, and the crises that shape some of their stories are treated with baffling shallowness. Nora (Nithya)’s problems with her careerist mother and a badly staged sequence set around the idea of Hindi imposition also suffer from this lack of nuance.

She does manage to build a few genuinely warm segments, in true traditions of a writer who can whip up drama without trying too hard. This, still, is her weakest film; its ambition is simulated, it deals in broad strokes, and is too caught up with its context to tell a good story.