The Biting Familiarity of ‘The Great Indian Kitchen’

At the beginning of The Great Indian Kitchen, a man asks his new daughter-in-law (a tremendously expressive Nimisha Sajayan) whether she has ground the chamandi by hand. She confesses she has used a mixer. He tells her that’s fine: “Why strain yourself grinding chutney by hand?” And we, the audience, are lulled into a false sense of security. Here is a tolerant household.

That is part of the nuanced beauty of director Jeo Baby’s film. Although it was released in 2021, it feels eternally relevant to women. The horror unfolds slowly. The film has the pace of a boat on the Kerala backwaters: it is more documentary than drama. A young woman comes to her husband’s house and spends her days cooking and cleaning. On its face, it does not seem like the worst fate in the world. But when her mother-in-law leaves, and the woman — left nameless in a clever narrative choice) — takes on all the housework, she begins to crack.