By not turning Mrs Deshpande into a monster like the notorious Hannibal Lecter, the show may have reduced the chills. Still, it’s an efficiently made crime show, which depends on the stardom of Madhuri Dixit, observes Deepa Gahlot.
What distinguishes Mrs Deshpande from other police procedurals is that one of the leads is a female serial killer, and she is played by Madhuri Dixit.
Directed by Nagesh Kukunoor, Mrs Deshpande is based on the 2017 French series La Mante, which had a horrifically violent Korean remake, Queen Mantis (2025), in which the female serial killer cuts off her victims’ tongues and pushes them into their anus.
Compared to these psychos, Mrs Deshpande is tame. She used to strangle the men with a green plastic rope, open their eyes and pose them in front of a mirror.
Because she is played by Dixit, she is not truly evil, she was a vigilante and her victims, she says, deserved to die.
The first one certainly did, as he drunkenly tried to rape her.
She was caught and after a surprisingly secret trial, and spent 25 years in a Pune jail under a new identity, looking like she has just stepped out of a spa.
Unlike the characters she is based on, she was not in solitary confinement, but a model prisoner doing yoga, and cooking gourmet meals for the inmates.
Outside, she used to run a popular restaurant and likes making Maharashtrian dishes.
She is also, for some reason, trained in the Israeli martial art of Krav Maga.
Seema Deshpande comes into the picture when a copycat killer stars murdering people with the same modus operandi.
Arun (Priyanshu Chatterjee), who had arrested her 25 years ago and seems to have a soft spot for her, arrives at the prison.
She offers to help with the new case, provided she is taken out of prison and lodged in a safe house. She also wants Inspector Tejas Phadke (Siddharth Chandekar) to work on the case.
In the other shows, the connection between her character and the inspector is revealed at the start. Here, it comes as a shock to him.
As Tejas blunders about following leads as other murders take place, she gradually endears herself to her guards by making then delicious meals.
Tejas is always rude to her. Their interactions could have had a chess match, clashing of wits feel of The Silence of the Lambs, but it’s one-sided because she is always nice and helpful while he is suspicious and sullen.
Tejas lives with his grandfather (Pradeep Velankar) and understanding wife (Diksha Juneja), and has been told he is an orphan.
On the case, he chases up red herrings. His own past also unravels.
Seema had been a few steps ahead of the cops all along, like carrying out a secret correspondence with a deranged ‘fan’ (Kavin Dave) and making tranquilisers with mushrooms.
The walls of the safe house are not strong enough to hold her, but a strange loyalty to family is.
She concludes that the copycat killer had seen her commit the first murder — it seems too many did — and for their own reasons, kept silent for 25 years.
It sends Tejas chasing after one possible suspect, but oops! wrong guy. Eventually, it dawns on him who the killer might be, and there’s a desperate chase to prevent another murder.
It’s not a spoiler because the French and Korean versions faced protests for being transphobic; Mrs Deshpande does not alter the identity of the copycat killer.
Mercifully, the murders in Mrs Deshpande are not grisly, like the terrifying washing machine killing scene in La Mante, which was famously praised by Stephen King, or the tongue-chopping in Queen Mantis.
By not turning Mrs Deshpande into a monster like the notorious Hannibal Lecter, the show may have reduced the chills.
Still, it’s an efficiently made crime show, which depends on the stardom of Madhuri Dixit. She plays Seema Deshpande with a dark unblinking gaze, which softens when she calms her always ticking, manipulative mind.
Chandekar is unable to convincingly portray the confusion and internal conflict of his character, as a result of which he comes across as too stilted.
Mrs Deshpande is streaming on JioHotstar.
