This article explores 'The Great Shamsuddin Family', a 2025 Hindi-language comedy-drama written and directed by Anusha Rizvi, about a single chaotic day inside the Delhi home of an upper-middle-class Muslim family. Anchored by an ensemble cast including Kritika Kamra, Shreya Dhanwanthary, Sheeba Chaddha, Farida Jalal, and Purab Kohli, the film uses family conflict to examine themes of belonging, migration, interfaith relationships, generational gaps, and the everyday anxieties of being Muslim in contemporary India. 

Note: The director of 'The Great Shamsuddin Family', Anusha Rizvi, is married to filmmaker Mahmood Farooqui, who was convicted in 2016 by an Indian court for rape and sentenced to seven years in prison. The conviction was later overturned by the Delhi High Court in 2017 and upheld by the Supreme Court on appeal, on grounds that raised significant controversy over interpretations of consent in Indian law. Rizvi publicly described the conviction as unjust and false, and defended her husband’s innocence at the time of the acquittal and appeal. We acknowledge the deeply problematic nature of this history, the seriousness of sexual violence and the importance of accountability. However, a film is the product of many creators — actors, writers, technicians and a wider team — and the story The Great Shamsuddin Family tells is independent of that personal history. It's also an important story to highlight in the current political climate of hyper nationalistic and even bigoted depictions of Muslims and minorities.

'The Great Shamsuddin Family' is a 2025 Hindi-language comedy-drama written and directed by Anusha Rizvi. Known for her acclaimed debut Peepli Live (2010), Rizvi returns after 15 years with a film that is set entirely over the course of one turbulent day in the life of an upper middle-class Muslim family in Delhi. The movie features an ensemble cast including Kritika Kamra as Bani Ahmed, Shreya Dhanwanthary, Sheeba Chaddha, Farida Jalal, and Purab Kohli among others. 

Bani, a disciplined and earnest writer, is on the brink of submitting an important job application for a post at the University of California, Berkeley. The deadline looms just 12 hours away, and she's in a rush to make it. But before she can make any progress, her cousin Iram storms in with a crisis: she has withdrawn ₹25 lakh from their mother’s bank account without her permission and given it to a friend. Iram now wants to return the money with her alimony before their mother discovers what she has done. 

One by one, more relatives and friends arrive, each bringing their own problems things they need from Bani. Their older sister Humaira is here to help Iram deposit the cash, Soon their Mom and her sister drop by to pickup her passport for a pilgrimage they're planning, and eventually, Bani’s cousin Zoheb shows up with his fiancée, Pallavi, a Hindu woman he has eloped with and wants to marry. They have not been able to find a registrar to solemnise their marriage, so they come to Bani’s home seeking refuge — and perhaps tacit approval. Bani's day of writing has now pivoted into a whirlwind of constantly putting out fires and managing the tempers running high. 

Also present amidst this chaos is Amitav, a professor friend of Bani’s, who has brought a 20-something student, who he's also dating, to the house just to get some drinks. He casually hangs around in the background, errupting into sociological observations about relationships and family dynamics in academic jargon. Often played for comic relief, these incisive interruptions also point to a very familiar human impulse — the need to intellectualise or pathologise family conflict as a way of making sense of it. However, lacking empathy, they reflect a detached, outsider’s way of looking at family — one that dissects everything but allows no space for real understanding.

Over the course of the film, Bani's apartment fills rapidly, with every room and corridor turning into a space of emotional confrontation, awkward truths and slipping secrets. The film keeps its audience continually off balance, for the better part of the narrative, revealing new threads, misunderstandings and comic frustrations as the day progresses. This boiling cauldron of domestic disruption is, on its surface, a high-octane family drama. Yet, The Great Shamsuddin Family uses these familial tensions to explore deeper themes of identity, belonging, religion, societal fear, and generational perspectives, including the broader anxieties of life in contemporary India for minority communities. 

The film places a regular Muslim family at the centre of its narrative at a time when Indian cinema and popular culture have repeatedly contributed to suspicion and fear around Muslim identities. Over the past decade, Muslim characters have often been reduced to being symbols of threat, with background scores, visual cues and dialogue doing the work of turning religion itself into something menacing. This has spilled beyond cinema into social media culture — from viral TikTok and Instagram audio clips about 'maksad' that equate Muslim identity with religious extremism, to mainstream blockbusters like 'Dhurandhar' reinforcing an environment where religious minorities are viewed with a default scepticism.

The Great Shamsuddin Family pushes back against this atmosphere by insisting on the normalcy of a family. These characters argue, lie, fall in love, engage in gossip, disappoint their parents and worry about jobs — the same things families everywhere do. By grounding its politics in domestic life, it attempts to strip away the distance that nationalist propaganda films often creates between 'us' and 'them' and neutralise the fear that has been cultivated around Muslim existence in the public imagination.

Religion and community intersect within the narrative in both subtle and explicit ways. The plan for Bani’s mother and sisters to go on a pilgrimage to Mecca, the interfaith dynamics of Zoheb and Pallavi’s relationship, and the pervasive sense of looming external dangers all point to how faith and identity shape the characters’ lives. When communal violence breaks out on the highway and a family member is feared caught in it, Bani’s sister Humaira — who earlier accused her of abandoning the family by seeking a job abroad — urges her to finish the application, acknowledging the harsh truth that staying here might not be sustainable. 

The film draws a clear parallel between family and nation, treating both as spaces of love, conflict, obligation and exhaustion. Both can be suffocating yet difficult to abandon because thy're a part of our identity. Both come with the painful contradiction of loving a home that does not always love you back. Through Bani’s struggle, the film articulates a dilemma many feel today: the desire to leave for safety and opportunity, and the guilt of feeling like that choice amounts to betrayal. 

In one of YouTuber Samdish Bhatia's more viral interactions, A Jamia Millia Islamia student mentions his grandfather who used to say, "Hindustan ek khwaab hai" (India is a dream). The people who believe in this dream are the ones who come here and choose to stay here. And there's a place for everyone in this dream. The Great Shamsuddin Family appeals to the love we have for our dysfunctional families in service of making a space for that dream. It's a little cinematic pocket of hope for co-existence and communal harmony that can perhaps one day be restored in the real world. 

You can stream the film here.

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