1.5 Stars (out of 4)
The dread in Baramulla builds slowly. It has nothing to do with the missing children or the creepy house filled with strange noises and shadowy figures. By the time an onscreen dedication rolls after the climax, one’s worst fears are confirmed: the goal of this film isn’t to tell an interesting story but to push an agenda.
Baramulla takes place in the titular city in Jammu and Kashmir in 2016. Controversial Deputy Superintendent of Police Ridwaan Sayyed (Manav Kaul) is transferred to the town after some yet-unspecified negative experience necessitated a change of scenery. He arrives with his wife Gulnaar (Bhasha Sumbli), teenage daughter Noorie (Arista Mehta), and young son Ayaan (Singh Rohaan).
The house they’re put up in is spooky as all get out, with furnishings unchanged for decades. It’s massive, with two decaying wings on either side of the main building the family occupies. From the moment they arrive, everyone but Ridwaan hears unsettling sounds, sees eerie shadows, and smells weird smells that can’t be explained.
Ridwaan is too busy with work to pay attention to his family. A boy named Shoaib disappeared during a magic show at a carnival. The cops and the boy’s father — a former politician with plenty of enemies — would prefer to blame the magician, but Ridwaan isn’t convinced. No one has sent a ransom demand, and a lock of Shoaib’s hair was found in the magician’s “disappearing” trunk. If the mage had given the boy a haircut mid-performance, there would’ve been dozens of witnesses.
Ridwaan has worked in Jammu and Kashmir long enough to appreciate the factors complicating his investigation. Politics are fraught, there are militants about, and absolutely everyone distrusts the police. But it takes more disappearances and unusual occurrences for him to accept that his perpetrator could be undead.
The setup is compelling but it isn’t sufficiently fleshed out. The taciturn characters are indistinct. Ridwaan and Noorie are supposedly in a major tiff that predates their move to Baramulla, but it doesn’t feel any different from typical teenage drama. Yet when it’s revealed what led to the frosty father-daughter relationship, it’s so terrible that it makes the characters relatively blasé behavior look bizarre in retrospect.
Director Aditya Suhas Jambhale (Article 370) — who co-wrote the film with his Article 370 producer Aditya Dhar — glosses over relationships and eschews character development. Those foundational storytelling elements are secondary to the mission: making ragebait.
Global viewers who aren’t familiar with the history of the region won’t get a lot of context from Baramulla. The film was clearly written around the post-climax on-screen dedication (which I won’t quote so as to not spoil the film). There’s nothing new about using real-world tragedy as inspiration, but Jambhale and Dhar seem to think that just doing so is enough, regardless of how well it’s integrated into the present-day story they’re telling.
The laxness about the present-day storyline is most evident in the rules governing the supernatural in Baramulla, or lack thereof. Ghosts in stories are often tied to specific locations or individuals. In Baramulla, they can be anywhere — not for any world-building reasons, but simply for plot convenience.
The climax also reinforces a pernicious thread within the film: the idea that Muslim children are all potential militants and therefore not to be trusted. Further, despite their still-developing brains, Muslim children are to be held to the same (if not higher) moral standards as adults. They are not considered victims of radicalization but equal participants.
I feel like I write this a lot, but Baramulla has all the components of a good movie. Shown through a different perspective by someone with more experience with the genre, this could’ve made a powerful emotional impact. As it is, all I can be is disappointed.
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