The Weight of Inherited Expectations

Read Time:5 Minute, 24 Second

MOVIE REVIEW
Shape of Momo
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Genre: Drama, Family, Social Realism
Year Released: 2025
Runtime: 1h 54m
Director(s): Tribeny Rai
Writer(s): Tribeny Rai, Kislay
Cast: Gaumaya Gurung, Pashupati Rai, Shyama Shree Sherpa, Rahul Mukhia, Janaki Kadayat
Where to Watch: shown at the 2025 San Sebastian Film Festival & Busan International Film Festival

RAVING REVIEW: SHAPE OF MOMO is a patient, deeply human drama that draws its strength from silence as much as from dialogue. Tribeny Rai, making her feature film debut, crafts a story that feels intimate yet expansive, grounded in the textures of Himalayan village life but resonating with universal questions of duty, independence, and identity. The film is rooted in the community, tradition, and expectation. Yet, it also carries an undercurrent of rebellion, pushing against the constraints that women often inherit when family and culture collide.

The story follows Bishnu, who returns to her village after leaving her job in the city. What awaits her is less a homecoming than a reckoning. Her family, weighed down by expectations and loss, greets her not with open arms but with a web of obligations. The arrival of her sister intensifies those pressures, and Bishnu’s tentative bond with a man deemed “suitable” by her community tests her resolve to choose for herself. What begins as a personal decision evolves into a broader reflection on how independence is often perceived as selfishness when it clashes with tradition.

What sets SHAPE OF MOMO apart is its refusal to dramatize with melodrama. Rai’s approach is observational, attentive to pauses. Conversations are punctuated by silence, stares carry unspoken judgment, and the spaces between words often reveal more than the dialogue itself. That restraint draws the audience into Bishnu’s world, where small decisions feel monumental due to the weight they carry.

The performances serve this style beautifully. Gaumaya Gurung, as Bishnu, captures the strength of someone caught between duty and desire. Her face communicates the push and pull of choice—hesitation, guilt, resolve—without ever leaning into exaggeration. Shyama Shree Sherpa, as a family elder, embodies the contradictions of tradition: both protective and oppressive, tender yet unyielding.

Rai leans into the natural beauty of the Himalayan setting. The cinematography emphasizes earthy tones, natural lighting, and interiors. Houses feel cramped not because of the set design but because of the weight of generations pressing into them. The mountains loom in the background, at once liberating and isolating, reminding us that escape is always visible but rarely attainable.

The use of language further enriches the film. English, Hindi, and Nepali weave through the conversations, sometimes within the same thoughts, reflecting both the hybridity of Bishnu’s world and the subtle hierarchies of who speaks to whom in what language. Subtitles translate the surface meaning, but the shifts between languages carry their own subtext—formality, intimacy, or distance. It’s a reminder that identity itself is multilingual, shaped by both inheritance and adaptation.

If the film has weaknesses, they stem from the same choices that define its strengths. Its pacing, deliberately slow, may test viewers who expect clear turning points or heightened drama. Some moments unfold with a muted arc that risks fading into the background. Yet this restraint feels intentional, a refusal to reduce Bishnu’s choices to a single dramatic confrontation. Instead, the film insists on reflecting reality: change happens gradually, resistance is often quiet, and independence rarely arrives with applause.

Rai’s collaboration with Kislay, who co-wrote the script, shows in the balance between personal story and social commentary. The film avoids moralizing speeches, letting the tensions emerge organically from the family dynamic. At the same time, it positions Bishnu’s struggle within a broader world: what does independence mean when tradition is a constant, immovable presence? What does progress look like when it comes at the cost of belonging?

SHAPE OF MOMO is about women’s agency within inherited structures. Bishnu’s drive to carve her own path, then, is both a rebellion against stagnation and a confrontation with grief. The film captures how trauma calcifies into tradition, and how breaking free requires both courage and sacrifice. The ending, quiet and open-ended, feels earned. Rai resists resolutions, choosing instead to leave Bishnu poised between paths. There’s no declaration, no rejection. Instead, there’s a recognition that independence is a process, one that might be claimed in small gestures as much as in dramatic breaks. It’s a conclusion that respects both the character and the audience, acknowledging the complexity of choice rather than reducing it to a moral lesson.

Tribeny Rai demonstrates a trust in her actors, her environment, and her audience that many directors take years to develop. She understands that restraint can be powerful, that silence can be eloquent, and that the most radical stories are often the most grounded in reality. The film may serve as a window into a specific cultural setting, but its resonance goes beyond geography. It touches anyone who has felt torn between personal desires and collective expectations, anyone who has struggled to define themselves in the shadow of tradition. Its pull lies in its specificity: the more it observes Bishnu’s world, the more clearly it reflects our own.

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[photo courtesy of DALLEY KHORSANI PRODUCTIONS, KATHKALA FILMS]

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