Name: Shape of Momo
Genre: Drama, Family
Duration: 1 h 55 min
Rating: 7.7
Cast: Pashupati Rai, Gaumaya Gurung, Shyama Shree Sherpa

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Shape of Momo

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A woman leaves her job and returns home to a family haunted by the repeated deaths of its male members. Finding the women around her resigned to their fate, she pushes them toward independence and self-reliance. Critically acclaimed worldwide, the film won top honors at the Seattle International Film Festival, Busan International Film Festival, and Spirit of Fire International Film Festival.

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At its centre is Bishnu, a 32-year-old woman who resists conformity in subtle yet powerful ways. Her quiet rebellion becomes the emotional core of the story. The narrative follows four women across three generations of a male-less household, each negotiating a society that views such a family as vulnerable, unsafe, and incomplete. Bishnu’s mother survives through caution and strategy, her sister embraces the conventional route of marriage and motherhood, while the grandmother clings to pride in her sons — one deceased, the other living abroad in Dubai, forever postponing his promise to take her with him.
In the absence of a male figure, the women endure prejudice, threats to their safety, and constant undermining by workers and tenants at their orange orchard. Ironically, the film highlights how society conditions women to believe they need the presence of men for protection often from men themselves.
Writers Kislay and Tribeny Rai portray patriarchy not merely as a system upheld by men, but as something deeply internalised by women themselves. One of the film’s most striking moments comes when the family fears an intruder in their isolated home and Bishnu’s mother shouts, “Your father will wake up,” hoping the mere suggestion of a man’s presence will scare him away. She even hangs her late husband’s clothes outside to create the illusion that a man still lives there — a heartbreaking reminder of how safety is often tied to masculinity.
Archana Ghangrekar’s cinematography beautifully captures Bishnu’s emotional isolation, whether she is sitting alone by the river or jogging through the misty hills. While outsiders often romanticise the mountains as places of peace, Bishnu experiences them as claustrophobic, filled with watchful eyes and unspoken judgement.
The immersive sound design by Akita Purkayastha and production design by Uttam Mondal vividly bring rural Sikkim to life, grounding the film in the textures of everyday existence rather than postcard beauty.
What makes Shape of Momo especially affecting is what it leaves unsaid. Its emotional power lies in pauses, silences, restrained heartbreak, and the quiet bond between women. The film trusts its audience enough to sit with discomfort and loneliness instead of overexplaining them. It’s a tender exploration of womanhood, belonging, and the invisible weight of patriarchy set against the breathtaking landscapes of Sikkim, where home is both sanctuary and a cage. It observes the quiet resilience of women living without men.
If you appreciate slow-burn, deeply personal stories rooted in atmosphere and emotional nuance, Shape of Momo is absolutely worth watching.

Under its deceptively calm surface, there’s a lot going on in Tribeny Rai’s assured debut Shape of Momo. Based on Rai’s own experiences, the film assimilates several themes– the search for self, the definition of home, gender roles, family ties– in a film which has the courage to back a lead character who refuses to confirm, or to be likeable.

While the other themes are familiar, the creation of Bishnu– stubborn and soft at the same time– breaks free from the good-girl trap that most female characters find themselves confined in, in our mainstream cinema. Only recently have we had characters (Varsha Bharath’s ‘Bad Girl’) that have broken free, and in turn, allowed the films to chart unexplored territories.

Played by Gaumaya Gurung, who bears a startling resemblance to the director, Bishnu is the kind of girl whose headstrong behaviour drives her mother (Pashupati Rai) and her visiting pregnant sister (Shyama Shree Thapa) up the wall. Having returned from Delhi, where one of her poems in ‘English’ has been published, no less, in a newspaper, Bishnu will now be matched suitably, get married, and make perfectly shaped momos, the acme of all accomplishment.
Wait. Scratch that. Bishnu will have nothing to do with shapely momos, even if that means turning her back on her personable suitor (Rahul Mukhiya). She will, instead, day dream by a running stream, curled up like a human momo, be vocal about wanting to turn their large home nestled in a meadow into a homestay (there’s a snarky line about ‘picturesque homestays’ which makes you smile), and lift a heavy gas cylinder by herself, much to her mother’s horror. It’s bad enough that the father, the strong male protector, is no more; Bishnu, striding about in shapeless fleece jackets and pants, is beyond.
An interesting thread is raised, as the insider-outsider debate rages in the North-East, when a working-class family unit who has lived in their outhouse is asked to leave: a woman whose husband is away earning money for the family, taking care of a sick daughter, and a mutinous teenage son who resents Bishnu’s high-handed ways, and refuses to be mollified by a gift of apples. They have gone to Nepal, we are told. A break-in, never explained, becomes enough reason for the local cops to roll up a group of men, who may or may not have had anything to do with it. While never making it explicit, the film taps into the rise of suspicion and distrust, mirroring current political realities, among people who’ve lived peaceably all these years.

The inclusion of a grandmother makes it a family of four women, who feel the absence of men in different ways: the grandma, old and bedridden but still feisty, waiting for her Dubai-based son, who thinks a new Iphone is a good enough replacement for his presence; the mother speaking of her dead husband who would tell off pesky unknown callers; the sister having to take permission for every small thing in her marital home, with the husband presumably happier being his mamma’s boy, and Bishnu herself who likes the man willing to give her space, but who is not acceptable should he turn into an arbiter of the shape of her momos.
The fact that he could perhaps help her in making those delectable edibles doesn’t occur to her, because the film refuses to box her in. That her mother understands Bishnu’s reluctance to give into the relentless domesticity of perfectly shaped momos is even more noteworthy, in a film full of telling strokes and real performances, with only a few obvious strands. And that’s clearly a scripting triumph: Rai has co-written the film with Kislay (the director of the terrific ‘Aise Hee’), creating a gentle, felt tapestry of dreams and desires.

Anything may happen when womanhood has ceased to be a protected occupation, scoffs Virginia Woolf in her fiercely feminist 1929 essay A Room of One’s Own. Her sarcasm over patriarchy’s need to confine women in roles decided by men carves 32-year-old Bishnu’s (Gaumaya Gurung) rebellion in director Tribeny Rai’s superbly sublime Shape of Momo.

A frame of Woolf’s essay, flanked by a picture of poets Rabindranath Tagore and Bishnu Kumari Waiba aka Parijat -- the Nepali writer she shares her name with -- adorning the walls of Bishnu’s childhood bedroom in her Sikkim home are telling of the liberal literature she fed on before escaping to Delhi in search of greener pastures.

Bishnu's Rebellion and Family Dynamics
Ironically, the harshest city to survive is less suffocating to her than meeting the traditional expectations of a close-knit community wanting nothing better than her to marry a boy from their lot.

If anything, Bishnu’s days in Green Park (a south Delhi neighbourhood) seem to have hardened her a bit, and the workers at the family-owned orange orchard or migrant labourers squatting their land are on the receiving end. As the self-appointed ‘man’ of the family, Bishnu takes offence at her all-women household’s wholehearted acceptance of the male privilege taking hold of their lives.

Between a pushover mom (Pashupati Rai) thrilled by the idea of her daughter seeing the local politician’s son (Rahul Mukhia), a pregnant sister (Shyama Shree Sherpa) being told her cucumber cravings are a sure shot sign she’ll give birth to a boy and a gadget-friendly grandma (Bhanu Maya Rai) waiting for her Dubai-based son to come and fetch her to no avail, Bishnu's irritation isn’t entirely unjustified if, sometimes, misdirected.

Scenarios where characters are no longer able to relate to the environment they were raised in are not unusual. Naming her cat Azaadi may be an unsubtle indication of her objectives but Bishnu doesn’t always hold a higher ground. Throwing on her dad’s jacket like a responsibility she must inherit to compensate for not being the son he was expecting, puffing a cigarette just to prove a point to a guy shows she’s not above playing into stereotypes.

Authenticity and Nuance in Storytelling
Rai’s screenplay, co-written by Kislay, neither clears her misconceptions nor shies away from her ambiguities. Whether she decides to stay on and set up a homestay in their huge house in the hills or return to a life she’s made on her own terms, Bishnu’s hemming and hawing has the temper of a real person.

As do the women she cannot live with or without.

Bishnu’s mother’s belief in the power of patriarchy runs so deep, it’s almost comical. Like Home Alone’s Kevin, she wards off so-called threats by making her sprawling house look like it's occupied by a lot of people, most importantly -- a man.

Generational Perspectives and Humour
On the other hand, Bishnu’s sister who threw away a promising basketball career to marry a mama's boy protests by contemplating a future she wants to lead and the courage she cannot find. But it is when these ladies gather around the truly devil-may-care, delightful member of their family, the grandmother, Shape of Momo’s cynicism makes way for charm and celebration.

The fart discussion on the dining table -- as they chomp on the titular dumplings, both perfectly pleated and awkwardly wrapped -- alone is worth the price of admission. There’s a lived-in quality, a comforting warmth and genuine humour about the actors in Shape of Momo and Rai's gentle focus on everyday lives and choices consumed by age-old conditioning as easily as it is by modern technology and Korean pop culture.

A Personal and Universal Narrative
Born out of the Sikkimese filmmaker’s own experiences in her native village, the Nepali speaking drama is not so much a story as it is like flipping through the pages of a personal diary. A slice-of-swimming against the tide in a climate of conformity, Shape of Momo has its moments of introspection, disenchantment and epiphany.

But instead of romanticising an idyllic setting to gloat in empty symbolism, Rai uses the sight of lush landscapes and sounds reverberating across pin drop silence to voice an unrest that speaks to womankind within and outside of the North East.

Shape of Momo

Shape of Momo

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