In Vasan Bala’s noir Monica, O My Darling, saucy secretary Monica (Huma Qureshi) taunts Jayant (Rajkummar Rao)—the object of her affection and subject of blackmail—about how it’s pure luck that’s made him the rising star of the tech company they both work at. “Fuck you,” is his ingenious retort. She slaps him thrice and brings him to tears, before they launch into a bloody brawl to the death.
Naina (Yami Gautam) of Behzad Khambata’s A Thursday oscillates between two modes—perfect-on-paper preschool teacher and haunted woman with the skills of a trained assassin—in her quest to avenge a past injustice. She brandishes guns and knives over Instagram Live after she’s taken her wards hostage—and consequently the entire country—to persuade the police force into meeting her ‘demands’.
In the penultimate scene from Madhur Bhandarkar’s Babli Bouncer, strongwoman Babli from a Haryana village (Tamannaah Bhatia) chases after four dudes in an SUV who’ve drugged and kidnapped a girl from the Delhi nightclub at which she works. She then pounds the living daylights out of them.
By the end of Siddharth Sengupta’s comedy Good Luck Jerry, it’s clear that quivering, wide-eyed Jaya (Janhvi Kapoor) is no lamb to the slaughter. When the ‘boss’ of the drug operation she’s joined (due to extenuating circumstances) tries to force himself on her, he’s left with a crushed spine. When she’s cornered in a pigsty by a sexual predator, she bats her eyelids in a clever misdirection before she, along with her mother and sister, attacks him.