Mad, Sad & Bad Review

In her entertaining anthropology-lite book 'Watching The English', Kate Fox devotes a chapter to English humour, concluding that it's not so much that we're funnier than other nations but that we use humour as a way of coping with our profound social awkwardness. Whenever a conversation threatens to become serious or difficult, we can always retreat to a joke.

The dispiritingly awful Mad, Sad & Bad uses comedy like this - as a means of not saying anything. Its broad strokes raise the occasional smile, but that's not the point - the point is apparently to get through a film dealing with break-ups, suicide, depression, psychiatry and family ties without rousing the merest flicker of a real emotion. The clunking script feels at times like a bad first draft - in some scenes, lines of dialogue are pointlessly repeated as characters ask to be told something that someone has already said; in others, ashen cliches are rolled out as if they were revelations. The actors can't do much with what they've been given, and all the performances are either wooden or overplayed.

Mad, Sad & Bad refers to the distinguishing qualities of three siblings. Hardeep (Zubin Varla) is a psychiatrist who is his mother's favourite despite being a sociopath; Atul ('EastEnders' star Nitin Ganatra) is a frustrated sitcom writer, and Rashmi (Meera Syal) is a frumpy, overgrown child who has yet to fly the nest. The eldest, Hardeep, is obviously the bad one, as we see immediately when a call from his mother, Usha (Leena Dhingra), interrupts him on the verge of a threesome with two teenage girls.

This scene locates the film in a weird parallel world where sexual hi-jinks and moustache-twirling badness go on as a matter of course, but at the same time the film remains grounded in a grindingly humdrum, boring reality. It's an unevenness of tone that continues to be a problem throughout. Is this an observational drama with comic touches, or a knockabout comedy? No one, least of all writer-director Avie Luthra, seems to know.