Coming home does not always feel warm or nostalgic. And Tribeny Rai captures this discomfort with honesty in her debut feature Shape of Momo, which has already won accolades at the international film festivals. What begins as a simple story of a woman returning to her village in Sikkim slowly opens into an emotional unraveling.
Bishnu returns to her village in Sikkim after quitting her job in Delhi, and almost immediately she slips into a world where everybody seems to have an opinion about how a woman should live. In one scene, she proudly reads out a piece of ad copy she wrote in the city, only for the conversation around her to drift toward marriage prospects within seconds.
Rai builds her narrative around emotions exactly like that — small humiliations, buried frustrations and the uneasy feeling of no longer fully belonging anywhere.
What makes the film stand out is the way Rai refuses to take easy sides. This is not one of those stories where the educated city returnee comes back to “fix” a backward village. Bishnu certainly believes she knows better at first. She questions her mother’s constant concern about what people will say, grows frustrated with her pregnant sister’s choices, and cannot understand why her grandmother continues to wait for a son working abroad to rescue her from this life. Having survived Delhi as both a woman and an outsider, Bishnu carries herself with the impatience of someone who has spent years learning how not to appear vulnerable.
Gaumaya Gurung plays Bishnu with restraint. Bishnu is not always pleasant company. She can be abrasive, defensive and self-righteous, especially when she takes over responsibilities around the family orchard and begins clashing with workers and vendors. Gurung lets the contradictions define her performance. You can sense Bishnu constantly performing toughness, as though relaxing for even a second might mean surrendering control.
What Rai understands so well is that Bishnu’s anger does not automatically make her right. Slowly, almost quietly, the film begins to push back against her assumptions. The village is not romanticised, but neither is it reduced to a symbol of oppression. The women around Bishnu are not simply victims waiting to be enlightened. They have learned how to survive within a structure that has shaped every aspect of their lives, and the film approaches that reality with empathy.
That emotional balance gives Shape of Momo its depth. Rai does not treat tradition and modernity like opposing teams where one side must win. Bishnu has escaped certain limitations by leaving home, but the city has left scars on her too. Delhi has sharpened her instincts, hardened her reactions and left her permanently defensive. Even when she begins developing feelings for Gyan (Rahul Mukhia), an architect, she struggles to let herself soften. The possibility of emotional dependence frightens her as much as the expectations she claims to reject.
The writing is especially strong in the smaller moments where Bishnu’s contradictions quietly surface. At one point, someone casually remarks that women should not smoke, and she immediately lights a cigarette almost out of defiance. In another scene, she criticises the patriarchal habits of the household while unconsciously adopting some of the same masculine behaviours herself — asserting control, suppressing emotion and trying to dominate situations instead of understanding them. Rai never underlines these moments too heavily, which is exactly why they land.
The title becomes more meaningful as the film unfolds. Bishnu struggles to make perfectly shaped momos, something her family notices repeatedly. “It’s the taste that matters,” she says dismissively at one point, but the line slowly takes on larger meaning. The momo becomes a quiet metaphor for the pressure to fit in. Bishnu herself feels oddly shapeless throughout the film, caught between the person she became in the city and the person this village still expects her to be.
Archana Ghangrekar’s cinematography captures Sikkim with intimacy rather than postcard beauty. The mountains remain present in the background, but Rai is far more interested in faces, silences, kitchens and shared spaces. Even the sound design contributes to the feeling that this village is alive in ways Bishnu both understands and resents. There is always some distant noise — workers in the field, conversations from another room, the sounds of cooking — reminding us that life here continues regardless of Bishnu’s internal crisis.
By the end, Shape of Momo stops feeling like a story about returning home and starts feeling like a story about the impossibility of fully returning anywhere. Rai understands that people can resent the traditions they come from while still feeling emotionally tied to them. Bishnu wants freedom, but she also wants belonging. She wants independence, but she still longs for understanding. The film never mocks those contradictions because it recognises how human they are.