'Baby Girl' Movie Review: No Room For Nuance In Nivin Pauly's Silly Thriller 

There’s a moral dilemma within Arun Varma’s Baby Girl that deserved a much deeper film. In a way, it’s a film that works like a silent conversation between two strangers, both women. More than people, they work a lot better when you think of them as opposing ends of an ethical debate.  The question they’re each trying to answer? Who deserves to be a mother, the woman capable of giving birth or the woman who can give a child unconditional love, even if the child is not hers?

Ritu, played by Lijomol, and 19-year-old Meenakshi, take up each end of this debate. Ritu struggles to give birth to a child as she realises that her third pregnancy too ends with a stillbirth. As for Meenakshi, the baby she birthed is someone you often hear people around her describe as a mistake, a lack of judgment from her and her immature boyfriend. But is there a way, ethical or otherwise, for this baby girl to end up with the right mother over the rightful mother? 

Writers Bobby-Sanjay take this question and wonder if it can be answered by using the genre compulsions of a real-time thriller. So instead of getting Ritu to sit across Meenakshi to have an extremely difficult conversation, what we see is a convoluted mess with this baby being treated like a package that goes missing. As implausible as it sounds, this baby is stolen and we’re meant to hold on as the film parades a series of doubtful characters, each with their own skewed logic to commit the crime. Co-incidences are aplenty, ensuring that people end up at the exact right place, just for the plot to move forward. 

Somewhere in the middle of all if this is a character played by Nivin Pauly. He’s Sanal, the attendant from the hospital where the baby goes missing from. He springs into action, not just because he feels duty-bound to rescue the baby given how she goes missing on his watch. The way Sanal’s character keeps popping back into action, just when you feel like he’s been missing, it simply feels like an afterthought to rework a hero into this film, just so marketing it becomes a lot easier. 

But as it turns out, Sanal isn’t the only character that feels superfluous in Baby Girl. When you try to connect the dots, one can even make the case that all the police officers in the film feel just as irrelevant. Of course, you do see them do their work as they make predictions based on virtual maps and a lot of botched planning but oftentimes, it just feels like they’re struggling to play catch up. 

The filmmaking feels dated and basic, like we’re in a film from the late 90s. Characters that are meant to look like gypsies look like they were borrowed from a school cultural fest and even dramatic moments in the writing, like when Meenakshi deals with a moral decision, turn inexcusably unserious with the performance. 

What makes the film feel even more rudimentary is Sam CS's music. It sounds so jarring and stilted that it feels like he forced Gemini to score it by using the simplest of prompts…Gemini, please insert thriller movie music. 

What we then end up with is a film that’s no match to the classic the same team made with Traffic more than a decade ago. Without the stress of a baby gone missing, it’s a movie where you miss the feeling of having cared at all. Ironically, in a film that's meant to underline the divine blessing that is childbirth, one wishes the baby had been slightly more important than a cute plot point.