Writer-Director Aditya Suhas Jambhale’s Baramulla is high on atmospheric pressure. This is militancy-ridden Kashmir. Everyone has a secret that he or she is not willing to share. Even the children are not spared from the welters of whispers that decorate the drama like trinkets on a Christmas tree.
The conspiratorial climate wraps itself around the screenplay, rendering the mood a mix of the sinister and the supernatural. For a large part, the narration is more hiccupy and intriguing, and not in a good way. The poor cop hero DSP Ridwaan Syed (Manav Kaul, strangely sterile in his performance) has a thankless role. He must crack the case of missing children and deal with a truant teenage daughter, Noorie (Arista Mehta), at home.
The girl, like most of the other characters, is troubled by the ghosts from her past, not to mention a boy in the present she befriends on a dating app who is not what he seems.
No one is. By the time the screenplay trots to its climax, I was left wondering if the mix of militancy and supernatural elements is a crossbred cinema we could do without, like pizza and sambhar. Or maybe like a Maachis and Stree mash-up.
Plenty of the plotting italics are misconstrued. The cop hero and family occupying a haunted house seems somewhat far-fetched: if the place is ghostly(what with the caretaker sneaking around with food plates that he shoves into locked rooms), why don’t they shift to somewhere less erie?
The payoff comes not a minute too soon. The climax, which clears the foggy atmosphere of the rest of the script and tackles the annihilation of Kashmiri Pandits headlong, is both sobering and jolting. But somehow the carnage seems too staged, what with the ghosts of the past haunting the traumatised characters.
At the end of this film of honourable intentions but little payoff, I was left with a feeling of betrayal. I genuinely wanted to like Baramulla, but there is very little to like. The performances are strictly serviceable. The actor, who plays a magician, behaves more like an exorcist. He makes a child vanish in a casket, much like the suspense that this film hankers for. The plot is constantly trying to aggravate the characters’ emotions to get our attention.
Eventually, the cavernous content feels more creepy than coherent.
The chant of ‘Maqsad-e-Azadi’ could be your desire to get out of the cumbersome labyrinth. The Kashmiri landscape is beckoning, which is more than can be said about the film. Manav Kaul looks lost throughout. He knows what we soon get to realise. There is too much going on here and too little justification for it.
