‘Baramulla’ Movie Review: Horror Lies In The Eyes of the Beholder

Baramulla opens with a striking single shot: a solitary flower bud in the snow attracts the attention of a child named Shoaib. It’s the sort of shot that usually ends with the sound of a bullet and the image of blood splattered across the whiteness. It is Kashmir after all. But the camera floats above the valley as the spell breaks and he trudges into the background. Minutes later, he disappears during a local magic show. Hard-nosed DSP Ridwaan Sayyed (Manav Kaul) is summoned to this town to crack the case and locate Shoaib, the son of a former MLA. Ridwaan’s track is rooted in the normal — more kids disappear from the same school, and the film shows a band of militants (led by a faceless mastermind named “Bhaijaan”) behind these kidnappings.

There is no secret here; the terrorists converse in evil farming analogies to reveal their ‘recruitment’ drive. The neighbours are name-dropped, the chain of command is conveyed. Ridwaan and team pursue them in a loosely inspired aftermath of the 2016 attack. There is, however, a paranormal track unfolding in his home. Ridwaan’s family — a distant teen daughter (Arista Mehta), an anxious wife (Bhasha Sumbli) — is haunted by sounds and smells from a mysterious room. The caretaker is deaf, but suspicious enough to visit this room with ritualistic offerings of food. The lonely son finds an other-worldly friend in this haunted house.

For the first hour of Baramulla, the two tracks run parallel to each other. The natural and the supernatural threaten to collide. At first, the domestic horror feels like an easy metaphor for the radicalisation of children. Perhaps the militants have ‘outsourced’ their mission to paranormal associates; perhaps the land is so broken that it’s hard to tell heaven from hell; perhaps the conflict is so irreversible that it co-opts the mystical. Once Ridwaan’s family becomes a target, the real connection begins to emerge. The identity of the spirits is the twist, of course. It’s like watching the film get possessed by a familiar, modern-day genre: the ghosts of Kashmir’s past are used to revise narratives about the India we live in, and vice versa. Where have we seen that before?

Of the many ways in which Hindi cinema has become a medium for cultural propaganda, I have to admit that Baramulla is the most creative. The genres so far were direct and damning: trigger-happy historical biopics, jingoistic war dramas, post-truth political thrillers, lavish mythological fables. Facts shape-shifted under the cover of fiction. But social horror is a new entry to peddle this worldview; fiction is readily employed to adapt facts. Suddenly everything is fair game, and there is no limit to the malleability of truth. As a result, this is a worryingly persuasive film, which isn’t a surprise coming from the makers of Article 370 and Uri: The Surgical Strike. It’s slickly written and conceived. The commentary is so committed that one almost forgets it’s problematic. The conceit is clever. The set-pieces are (mostly) coherent. Even the gimmick of mothers being proven right feeds into the current rhetoric of Indian masculinity. As a horror film, Baramulla is efficient with its tropes: dysfunctional family, haunted cop, creepy new house, missing children, the possibility of vengeful spirits, gunfights and jump-scares vying for attention, human terror posing as celestial chaos.

The context is the setting. Imagine the morality of Raaz marrying the opportunism of The Kashmir Files and Uri. You slowly notice the signs and symbols. The resilient white flower bud? A tulip that resembles a lotus. The score to denote danger? An eerie riff on Islamic prayer. The villain reveal and its implication? One faith is more tragic and magnanimous than the other. The title of the film? A real-world event coated with majoritarian pixie dust. The hero and family? The good-Muslim-bad-Muslim scaffolding. The message? Civilians need guidance, stone-pelting is a religion, and the authorities are misunderstood. The flashbacks? An ode to suffering. It’s all there. A few transition shots seem to be missing, particularly when the rebellious daughter is at odds with her parents. And during a climax that tries hard to combine genres and tones. None of this distracts from the core, though. It doesn’t pander so much as conspire to reframe an ideology.

In other words, Baramulla represents the peak of what I like to call “Stonefruit film-making”. Flavourful, juicy exteriors hiding a chewy and poisonous pit. It haunts — brainwashes — with style, bringing into play ambivalent factors like patriotism, who you are and whom you vote for. As routine consumers of therapy masquerading as entertainment, we’ve reached a stage where the taste of this venom is now the defining factor. They all kill, but the question is: is the murder honest or premeditated? This one is more authentic than its artificially produced and performative Bollywood counterparts. You can tell that it believes in its vision; it isn’t entirely commercial. The hate is more heartfelt. While progressive movies are stumbling to find a balance between text and subtext, films like Baramulla seem to revel in their access to artistic licenses. There is no handicap, and it shows. It’s both troubling and intriguing to see. A story about insidious things morphs into an insidious story about things. The line is thin today, and it’s one that viewers are often willing to cross in pursuit of retro-fitted trauma, generational closure and victimhood. The jumpscare is that it’s not so frightening anymore. Some hauntings are simply beyond exorcism. Some flags are red because they keep questioning the colour of the blood flowing through your veins.