Pati Patni Aur Woh is a remake of the classic film with the same title and explores the same themes of marital infidelity. Chintu Tyagi (Kartik Aryan) and his wife Vedika (Bhumi Pednekar) live in a cocoon of weirdly perfect marital bliss until south Delhi princess Tapasya Singh enter and disrupts it.

Chintu begins falling for her, realizing how hard and boring his life as a straight, Indian middle-class man is (clearly the most marginalized group in Indian society), and concocts a series of lies to get her to spend time with him. Somehow she falls for him while Vedika is still hopelessly in love with him, landing him in a series of predicaments.

The best part of this movie is the acting. Kartik Aryan perfectly pulls off the martyred and Bhumi Pednekar creates a foxy yet sanskari persona (seriously, Vedika is every guy’s dream). Even Ananya Pandey plays her basic, westernized big city girl role well, although any depth has been written out of her part. The best is Aparshakti Khurana, playing Chintu’s sidekick, who is hilarious and has great camaraderie with Aryan.

Many of the jokes in this movie are also funny, especially in the first half. However, for a movie made in 2019, in a more progressive era of Bollywood, it’s surprisingly un-woke. Sure, there’s a spicy and sex positive female lead. But she’s not given half the screen time of her male counterpart.

There are some distasteful religious jokes and misogynistic moments, the biggest of which is the seemingly #menwillbemen final scene. With the great actors in this film, it could’ve easily been used in the establishment of new Bollywood narratives. Instead, it gets disappointingly stuck in the sexist Bollywood tropes we’re so familiar with. For its comedy and acting, this movie is worth a watch. But its message needs to be taken with an extremely liberal, non-low sodium scoop of salt.

​Also for Bhumi Pednekar. She’s amazing.