There's a genuinely interesting film hidden inside Baby Do Die Do. It just takes far too long to reveal itself, and even then, it refuses to answer the questions that matter.
The film opens with a fractured family: a deceased father, an emotionally volatile mother, twin girls, one of whom is deaf and mute. A late-night adventure results in tragedy leaving Baby alone and vengeful.
Right away the questions start building—how did the girls suddenly pick up a puppy in an abandoned hotel? It's the first of many questions the film, co-written by director Nachiket Samant with Jasmeet K Reen and Parveez Shaikh, never answers.
A child’s voiceover narrates events as the action jumps 20 years ahead, by which time the deaf and mute Baby has become a deadly assassin. And here are the next big questions. How? What was her training like? Why is she so comfortable becoming a contract killer? Once again, the film never really tells us.
These aren't minor plot holes; they're the emotional foundation of the film. Without them, Baby remains an enigma long after she should have become a character.
Played by Huma Qureshi with an almost permanent poker face, Baby rarely reacts to anything—not even the deaths of people closest to her. Stoicism can be compelling, but here it creates distance. It's difficult to care about someone whose inner life the film seems reluctant to explore. The screenplay also misses the opportunity to meaningfully explore how she navigates the world as someone who is deaf and mute. Beyond occasionally scribbling notes on scraps of paper, she seems to have developed surprisingly few ways of communicating with the people in her life. When Qureshi finally gets a scene to show Baby’s vulnerability, it just makes you wish it had come sooner.
That lack of emotional context extends to Baby's relationship with 'Papa' (Chunky Panday), the father figure who trains and shepherds her into the life of an assassin. He's clearly meant to be central to her transformation, yet the film barely explores that bond or the mechanics of how she becomes such an efficient killer, leaving one of its most intriguing relationships frustratingly underdeveloped.
The first half doesn't help. It introduces a steady stream of characters and subplots—mainly a builder-goon nexus, smirking cops, a budding romance and a woman carrying unresolved trauma and grief—but there’s little for the audience to hold on to. One of those subplots is Baby's romance with Siddhu (Rachit Singh), a musician-turned-music teacher who decides he wants to marry Baby after little more than a few encounters on buses and auto-rickshaws. It's sweet in theory, but doesn’t carry enough emotional weight.
Meanwhile, people keep dying because that's what Baby does. She kills, and kills again, a grim pun on her surname—Karmakar. She’s an adept umbrella assassin, a neat noir touch that fits the film’s heightened world, even if it leaves you wondering what happens when Mumbai's monsoonal skies clear. By the time the story gathers momentum in the second half, the film has already asked for a lot of patience.
The supporting cast is stronger than the material they’re given. Rachit Singh brings warmth and an easy sincerity as Siddhu, while Sikandar Kher is effective as the menacing builder Zafar. Arun Kushwah is equally good as his mercurial younger brother Lucky, and Rupesh Bane is instantly likeable as Baby's neighbour Faizu, bringing some much-needed humanity to the proceedings. Vidya Malvade and Himanshu Malik play Mr and Mrs Murjhani, wealthy developers whose sophistication masks a ruthlessness to rival Zafar's. Seema Pahwa, meanwhile, is saddled with a caricatured police inspector.
What does work consistently is the world Samant creates. He has a terrific eye for Mumbai. Not the postcard version of Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus (VT), Marine Drive and the Sea Link, but a city of local trains, chawls, high-rises, bars, real-estate deals and subcultures that coexist side by side. A city that's constantly moving, being built and rebuilt, operating in the shadows. Even the songs, like ‘Kitni Gardi Hai’, though contrived, capture the city's restless pulse. However, ‘Alpha Q’ is a gauche play on words as it's performed, Magic Mike-style, in a gay club.
Samant certainly isn’t short of ideas. He throws together noir, graphic novel aesthetics, Mumbai life, romance, real-estate politics, action and revenge drama into a potent mix. The problem isn't the number of ideas; it's that many aren’t explored deeply enough to resonate. Baby Do Die Do has atmosphere and a wonderfully textured Mumbai, but its most intriguing ideas and killer premise never quite land.
Udita Jhunjhunwala is a Goa-based critic and curator.