By Shanti Wesley

My Wife’s Murder is an intriguing little film – unconventional in its lack of songs and effective in its suspense. While the second half of the film falters, the movie largely succeeds in taking us along for the ride with an ordinary man whisked away by very non-ordinary circumstances.

The set-up is simple and unsubtle. Ravi (Anil Kapoor) is a workaholic video editor with a nagging wife, Sheela (Suchitra Krishnamoorti), and two kids. This set-up is, in a way, unconventional: how often does a Hindi movie peer behind the happily ever after final curtain of romance to examine a slowly disintegrating marriage? Of course, the examination is rather simplistic – Sheela is a one-dimensional, nagging shrew, and Ravi is the patient, long-suffering husband, apparently not to blame at all for any conflict in the relationship. The film quickly insinuates the idea that, somehow, Sheela deserves to die because she’s such an awful wife.

And die she does, in an argument between husband and wife that gets out of control. Ravi slaps her; Sheela slaps him back; then, when Ravi angrily pushes her away, she falls backward, hits her head on the bed frame, and dies. Sure, it looks unintentional, and he is appropriately shocked and distressed, but I had to wonder, isn’t there some part of him that really wants Sheela dead? I think the film allows this ambiguity to persist, thus hinting disturbingly at the violent impulses buried inside even the most average, unassuming people.

The film’s strongest scenes are those immediately following Sheela’s death. As the pool of blood from her fatal head wound slowly spreads across the bedroom floor, we watch as Ravi makes the decision to hide her death. At first, he almost automatically picks up the phone to call the police, but then he envisions the scenario of the police investigating the incident, of them immediately suspecting him of the murder. Family pictures of his wife and children come into focus behind him as he ponders this image, underscoring his desire not to deprive his children of both parents at once. And so, ostensibly to prevent further trauma for his children (and, conveniently, to save himself!), he decides to lie about the circumstances of her death.

Director Jijy Philip does a good job of ratcheting up the suspense in the following scenes, as Ravi tries to cover up the evidence. Perhaps as a comment on how murder is usually sensationalized in films, this film focuses on the mundane details: Ravi struggles to wipe the blood off the floor, the fluid apparently proving to be more viscous and stubborn than he expects; he tries to hide the body like an inconveniently large suitcase in various places in the bedroom, and it is almost comically difficult – her feet keep sticking out from under the bed. The murder/death (one’s choice of words, as a character in the film itself points out, indicates whether one believes Ravi is a killer or simply a victim of circumstance) becomes all the more chilling for being set in the most ordinary, domestic, even intimate environment: the couple’s bedroom. What is ordinary and domestic quickly becomes macabre, and that’s the perverse thrill of these scenes.

There’s a squirmy edge-of-your-seatness to a moment when the son comes into the bedroom to look for his cricket bat, threatening to discover his mom’s body everywhere he looks – under the bed, in the closet, in a large box. At this moment we don’t know exactly where Ravi has hidden the body, so we share his fear that his son will find the dead body in the next place he looks.

Ultimately that’s the unsettling achievement of the film: it invites us to become part of Ravi’s scheming, to share his fear of being discovered, thus becoming complicit in his guilt. While the second half of the film sort of falls apart – everyone does increasingly stupid and implausible things – what stayed with me is the guilt of having almost been a part of the murder, of hoping that Ravi will get away with it. The film definitely manipulates us, making us believe that somehow Sheela’s death is not such a big tragedy because, after all, she was a shrew, that it’s not an act of violence for which Ravi is responsible, but simply an unfortunate accident.

As someone who has worked as a domestic violence advocate, I felt very conflicted and a bit angry: I was sort of relieved when Ravi is eventually acquitted and allowed to return home to his kids . . . wait, did this movie just make me root for a man who killed his wife? Manipulative, yes, but also, for the most part, a suspenseful, unsettling portrait of the unspoken murderous impulses that simmer beneath the domestic surface.