Nisha Ganatra

In Freakier Friday (2025) Jamie Lee Curtis plays a teenager, or rather a teenager stuck inside Curtis, and Nisha Ganatra has the sense to stand back and let her. It is the best thing in the film and the one thing the 2003 original did not have. Then Chad Michael Murray walks in, and Mark Harmon, and Stephen Tobolowsky, and Rosalind Chao and Lucille Soong from the restaurant, and each arrival gets a pause and a beat for recognition. Ganatra will not hurry anyone off. It is a generous habit and it is the reason a film with roughly eighty minutes of story runs 110.

The career explains the habit. Her first feature, Chutney Popcorn (1999), she wrote, directed, produced and acted in, a family comedy about a lesbian Indian-American woman acting as surrogate. It did not lead quickly to more features. Instead she spent the better part of two decades in television, directing on Girls, Mr. Robot, Shameless and Transparent, and producing on Better Things with Pamela Adlon, with whom she has worked four times. Episodic television teaches a director to serve an ensemble and hand it back intact, and that is the training she brought to Late Night (2019), The High Note (2020) and Freakier Friday.

What she is for is clear enough. Her comedies are about women in the workplace and mothers at home, and about families that do not come in the standard shape, and she puts those things on screen without making them the fight. Her own account is the plainest: "If I can talk about feminism, women in the workplace, diversity, and inclusion, all under the guise of comedy, then I've really succeeded." Late Night put Emma Thompson and Mindy Kaling in a late-night writers' room; The High Note gave Tracee Ellis Ross a music star and an assistant with ambitions of her own. We have not reviewed either and will not judge them here, but the subjects are of a piece.

What she is less good at is saying no. Freakier Friday has a four-way swap, a wedding, a pop star, a psychic and a school feud, and it is cheerful and busy and about half as funny as it needs to be. We laughed at Curtis and meant it; around the hour mark we felt a small, ungenerous impatience as the film waited for applause a living room cannot give, and we were not proud of the impatience but we did feel it. The performances are never the problem. Actors trust her and it shows. The shape of the thing is the problem, and shape is a director's job too.

She has spent a long time being the reliable pair of hands on other people's programmes, and the features suggest the hands are good. What they need next is a script someone has already cut, and an editor she is not too polite to argue with.