Join Us
Star Cast: Nimisha Sajayan, Barun Sobti, Anshuman Pushkar
Director: Ambiecka Pandit
What’s Good: Nimisha Sajayan delivers a good act, and Anshuman Pushkar shines in a film that does not put much effort into building their characters!
What’s Bad: The screenplay can’t decide whether it’s a crime thriller or a social drama, and ends up doing justice to neither!
Loo Break: Anytime you want, you might even take a nap if you want!
Watch or Not?: Might skip this one!
Language: Hindi
Available On: Prime Video
Runtime: 2 hours and 11 minutes
User Rating:
Suspense and social drama are two genres that are very tricky to blend, and very rarely is there a film that combines the best of both worlds! In one of the scenes of Babita Singh Reporting, you see Baby’s husband crying and blaming himself for being a bad husband! ‘Kya sochenge log, kaisa behave karta hai apni wife ke saath?’ he cries profusely, and while his wife, our protagonist Baby, is trying to calm him down, he hits harder and reminds her how her inefficiencies lead to the society taunting him for not having a child! ‘Thyroid tumhe hai, lekin bacche ke liye sunna mujhe padta hai!”
On paper, Amita Vyas and Ambiecka Pandit’s script sets out with a deeply empathetic objective: stripping away the glamorous, heroic avatar of a cop to showcase a sub-inspector who is treated like any regular girl in this country. She fights for respect – both at the police station and inside her own home. But on screen, the compassion and empathy this script tries to generate fall short, and the film looks half-baked in the first half itself!
Babita Singh Reporting Movie Review: Script Analysis
The story is a bit tricky! ASI Baby is tricked by her senior to accept a two-week suspension, taking blame for a mistake she did not make! She accepts the suspension, as she wants a long holiday for a trip to her in-laws’ place to perform the god-bharai function of her sister-in-law! However, this trip to her hometown in Rewa turns into an unofficial, obsessive probe into the mysterious death of her childhood friend Bansi (Barun Sobti), and the film attempts to mirror her internal awakening with an external investigation.
Does she find a voice and purpose to her life and profession while solving this case? Does this internal journey of a woman being suppressed in her family and her workspace find its way to a new awakening? All is answered by the film in 2 hours and 11 minutes!
Babita Singh Reporting Movie Review: Star Performance
Nimisha Sajayan is the absolute spine of this film. After watching her deal with the generational disrespect in The Great Indian Kitchen, you know how brilliant this woman can be when it comes to fighting misogyny and patriarchy! But she never lets you trace the self-doubt, humiliation, and quiet defiance in her character! Probably, because she herself struggles to find it! Nimisha is a very strong yet subtle, grounded performer, but she deserved a much sharper film to elevate her skills!
Barun Sobti brings just the right amount of intrigue and ambiguity to his limited role as Bansi, ensuring that his presence lingers over the narrative. However, even his presence is not used properly to sharpen the screenplay!
Anshumaan Pushkar plays the emotionally unavailable, yet the dicey husband, brilliantly! He has an alarmingly convincing precision in this crooked screenplay, and while the rest of the cast tries to find their space to shine in the script, Pushkar does it effortlessly!
Trending
Babita Singh Reporting Movie Review: Direction, Music
Ambieka Pandit’s world-building suffers a major crisis of vision! She is confused about the genre of the film in the beginning, and she cannot decide it till the end! What seems like a cop drama turned murder mystery turned woman-empowerment story turned social drama keeps playing tic-tac-toe with all these POVs but can’t make any one of them the central theme of the film! The screenplay should have been a very sharp investigative progression that pushes Baby towards brilliance! But it falls into a repetitive trap – Baby torn between her professional ambition and personal duties!
Babita Singh Reporting wants credit for raising important questions about emotional bonding in a relationship and the generational disrespect a woman endures in her home and workplace. Still, it hesitates to pull the trigger and avenge all that disrespect! Ambiecka Pandit design Baby well – a woman, who has been recruited to the Police Force after her father’s death, rather than her merit, and she is reminded of the same, almost every 12 minutes in the film! But Baby never proves it otherwise! Not even in the climax! You do not see any urgency in her character to fight for her respect. You see her frustrated, but never frustrated enough to challenge the disrespect she is being charged with! And this backfires for the film brutally!
Where Ambiecka falters is in maintaining a strong momentum. The chase sequences and investigative breakthroughs are so uninteresting that they outright bore you! You are not interested in finding out who murdered whom! You have no interest if Baby solves this case or not! The background score also fails to provide any strong elevation to the narrative! Nor does the song in the end has any personality of its own!
Babita Singh Reporting Movie Review: The Last Word
The director demonstrates a sensitive eye for women and their issues, but she fails to make the best use of them to carve a story that touches you emotionally! The major problem with this film is that it never reaches for your heart, neither for the thrill or suspense of a murder mystery, nor for the empathy of a social drama! The film still has its moments, mostly during the conversations between the husband and wife! Amidst the forced smiles in response to passive-aggressive taunts and the quiet dignity of a woman finding her footing, the film keeps oscillating and struggling!
Baby is a very poorly written character. A cop who is quiet and underconfident, carrying the exhausting weight of a woman constantly made to feel invisible and inadequate. The major problem with her is that she never fights for her respect, even till the end. You do not see any strong turnaround that makes you root for her! Seeing a woman ridiculed for her weight by her husband every now and then, without generating empathy, is such a frustrating path the film keeps taking!
Babita Singh Reporting is a well-intentioned but lazy film! It has all the thematic ingredients to be an impactful social drama on domestic patriarchy wrapped in a crime story, but its inability to commit fully to any of the genres makes it one of the most uninteresting cop stories I have watched in recent times! It wants to be two films at once – a small-town whodunit and a social drama about a woman fighting to be taken seriously at work and at home. On paper, that’s a promising combination. But on screen it is a dead story!
2 stars!
Babita Singh Reporting Trailer
For more Bollywood movie reviews, stay tuned to Koimoi.
Follow Us: Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | YouTube | Google News
