As an assassin story, Baby Do Die Do is not out of the ordinary. The only novelty is that the brooding hero is a deaf-and-mute hitwoman, not a hitman. The tropes are Freudian and familiar. A childhood tragedy turns this woman named Baby (Huma Qureshi) into a cold-blooded contract killer. She works for a father figure called Papa (Chunky Panday). She’s slick and experienced at her job; a sharp-shooting umbrella is her weapon. She finds a good man (Rachit Singh), and suddenly, the secret is too heavy. She wants out of the profession. She wants to be human. Except it’s not that simple. She’s in too deep. A bloody mess is imminent.
Given the template, the film-making is obligated to be inventive. It starts with the title: the English translation of the Maharashtrian name ‘Baby Karmarkar’ (Do-die-do: Kar-mar-kar). Baby cannot speak or hear, so the audiovisual identity of the story is heightened. It has sensory swagger: from black-and-white flashbacks and silent-movie gimmicks to funky music and rainy neon-lit terraces. Zack Snyder would be pleased. The colour red becomes a character. A murder is seen in reverse during the rewinding of CCTV footage. Cellphone messages, split-screens, voice notes and subtitles are liberally used as narrative devices. The humour is dark too; the man in Baby’s life, for instance, is fated to face one shock after another (which may include the discovery of her trigger-happy umbrella). There are songs called “Alpha Q” (in a gay nightclub) and “Mutual funds are subject to market risk” (scoring a wedding montage).
The pacing is a bit wonky and restless. Too many characters jostle for interest: the partner, a shady lawyer, a male colleague who messes up, a corrupt cop, a mentor, a young neighbour in the chawl, a villain and his doomed brother, a seedy tycoon and others. At some point in the second half, the coincidences start to pile up — Baby’s hits somehow reach her doorstep. It becomes hard to keep track of the interconnected threads and loyalties. They’re bunched together towards the end because the story doesn’t know what to do with some of them.
A neat climactic twist stays faithful to the genre, riffing on the do-die-do part of the title; it lends context to the framing device of a child’s awkward voice-over. Huma Qureshi plays Baby as a deadpan killer who isn’t an ‘action star’ per se. Her cover is that she cannot look like an assassin; both gender and disability serve as a ruse. The rest of the cast gets their moments, especially Rachit Singh as Baby’s non-toxic but unprepared boyfriend and Chunky Panday as her paternal boss. One might argue that Sikandar Kher is pigeonholed as this very specific kind of baddie: sinister, eccentric, full of unpredictable banter. But few actors get the beats better than him; few toy with the presence of the camera like he does. He gives the script some legroom to stay in a moment instead of constantly moving.
But the reason Baby Do Die Do works is because it expands the personality of an assassin thriller. The style is not a front for the substance. Baby might be the medium, but it’s the city of Mumbai that becomes the protagonist of the film. All the Bollywood tropes we generally associate with the place — twin siblings, a generational revenge arc, gnarly builders, local trains, giant hoardings, chawls teeming with social diversity, an abandoned Centaur hotel under dispute (one of two Slumdog Millionaire nods) — are baked into the genre and its atmospherics. The city mutates from a grainy black-and-white character in the flashbacks to a wet dystopian landscape that’s perpetually under construction and in a state of moral decay. Baby is a hired hand in the murky real-estate business that has flattened the vintage character of the metropolis. Over time, it becomes a chase between these two cinematic and cultural identities of Mumbai.
The commentary and form share a universe with Anurag Kashyap’s Kennedy, except it isn’t as scattered or sardonic. The new-age overlords — whose names rhyme with real-world industrialists and capitalists — corner the old-school faces and secular strivers, threatening to erase them from a soulless future. There’s an in-joke about this: a debauched character dies, but the photo used in his funeral is from the actor’s nostalgic Tum Bin days. There’s a poignant scene, too: Baby stops a younger version of her from embarking on a filmy revenge journey. Sikhs, Muslims, Hindus and Christians from the Hindi cinema and Mumbai of yore are pitted against one another, shaping the chaos at the center of the film.
It’s almost as if Baby becomes the last (wo)man standing in a place that trades natural evolution for artificial growth; in a city that stops speaking and listening in its quest to survive; in a concrete jungle that becomes a ghost in the guise of spirit. Baby is sidelined by the modern builders and the breakers, until her past comes storming back like a hero determined to end her war with the Mumbai she blamed (and attacked) for her trauma. Before it’s too late, her story reclaims the agency of a city that was once just that: a story under construction. That it was eventually written by those with power and allegiances rather than those with vision and humanity is a tragedy that’s nicely reflected in this film. After all, a tiny typo is all that separates Baby Do Die Do from ‘Bbay’ Do Die Do: shorthand for a city that keeps dying because it never sleeps.