Darlings

The idea of playing domestic abuse for comedy is offensive and unjustifiable, and for those reasons Darlings fails badly from the start. Aiming for humor, the movie is often flippant about abuse, which feels utterly inappropriate. Why does it take two hours for Badru to figure out that if she does to Hamza what he did to her, she is just as bad as he is? Hamza is a terrible, unredeemable person, but once Badru starts plotting his torture and even murder, how is she any better? And how is any of it funny? How does making the cops stupid help? Would she really rather murder her husband than imprison him?

Other ugly points of view are treated as acceptable. Someone says that the cure for India's population problem is a program of forced sterilization. Someone else praises China's one-child policy, which resulted in the murder of unwanted babies. A woman says that men who hit women are cowards. Why aren't women who hit men just as cowardly? (By the way, the man in question promptly responds to the "coward" accusation by giving the woman a bloody nose.) It's ridiculous to imagine that an abused woman who can't let the police take her husband to jail is capable of tying him to railroad tracks and leaving him to get mangled by a train. In that way, the movie mocks victims of abuse unforgivably.