Baby Do Die Do Review: Fast-paced, atmospheric, cheeky and perpetually thrilling, Baby Do Die Do may, at first glance, sound like an offbeat title looking to startle curiosity. But this Nachiket Sawant directorial, which transforms Jasmeet K Reen’s story into a thrilling and entertaining watch, is sautéed with all the delectable ingredients that make a black comedy thriller not just gripping, but visually appetising too. The film, which deftly blends the eccentricities of indie filmmaking with the recognisable markers of a typical commercial movie, may perhaps seem jarring in the beginning. But the deeper you sink into its strange, neon-streaked world, the more you develop an appetite for this new breed of storytelling, where something fresh keeps surfacing beyond the usual clichés that so often inundate this genre. But is everything truly hunky-dory enough for the film to set itself apart from others? Let’s find out.
Two little twin girls wander into a partially constructed five-star hotel somewhere in Mumbai as rain lashes the city with relentless fury. One of the girls is deaf and mute, while the other narrates the story, lamenting the poverty-stricken world they come from and observing how a sprawling place like this is big enough for anyone to disappear into. As the two explore the skeletal structure of the building, they unexpectedly witness a murder.
With their gaze frozen on the grisly occurrence, the pup in one of the girls’ arms lets out a whine. The sound diverts the killer’s attention towards them. The twins run for their lives, the deaf and mute sister wearing an anklet so she does not get separated from her sibling. The sound of the anklet is her assurance that her sister is nearby.
The murderer follows them, crawling surreptitiously, his face obscured by a handkerchief, whistling ominously like a predator announcing doom through a nursery rhyme. As one of the sisters scurries into a room, the murderer follows her inside and locks the door. The scene then cuts to the dead body of one sister, while the other stands just a few feet away from her. It is then revealed that the deaf and mute sister is alive, and the one who died was the sister who could speak.
We return to the present, where a woman wielding an umbrella enters a local train. She eyes a man across the crowd who is speaking to someone on the phone. She secretly clicks his picture and forwards it to a contact saved as “Papa.” A thumbs-up emoji flashes on her screen. She walks up to the man, stands next to him, mildly presses the umbrella against him and then pulls a trigger, killing him before silently getting off at the next station.
The woman is none other than Baby Karmarkar, played by Huma Qureshi, the same deaf and mute sister who had lost her twin in that hotel years ago. She is now a hitwoman working for PM Jain, played by Chunky Panday, whom she refers to as Papa, because after her sister’s death, he took her under his wing and groomed her. Baby too took up these hit jobs so that, one day, she could come face to face with the person who killed her sister and finally avenge her.
PM Jain, aka Papa, carries out this killing business on behalf of Zafar Katekar, played by Sikandar Kher, a powerful Mumbai builder who has constructed one of the tallest towers in the city after his younger brother Lucky, played by Arun Kushwah. Zafar has a very particular way of getting things done. He either talks people into submission or removes them from the face of the earth with PM Jain’s help.
Coming back to our protagonist, Baby Karmarkar, when she is not executing people, she returns to her house, where her mother keeps venting and repeatedly tells her what a good-for-nothing woman she is, and that she should have died that night instead of her sister. The monologues of her dead sister also keep resurfacing as Baby stands on her rooftop, silently observing the world around her.
On another rooftop, she sees two lovers, and through her expressions, we glimpse her yearning to love and be loved. The voice of her dead sister exclaims how Baby, in her search for a murderer, became a murderer herself.
Just across the building lives another interesting character named Amandeep Singh Siddhu, played by Rachit Singh, a singer who arrived in Mumbai with soaring aspirations but now teaches music as a tool to reform children with criminal dispositions. He is also secretly in love with Baby. We see this through a very creative music montage of him crossing paths with her in his day-to-day life, as the two quietly acknowledge each other and he falls for her even more.
