Baby Girl Movie Review
Baby Girl begins with an urgent premise. A three-day-old newborn girl goes missing from a hospital in Thiruvananthapuram, just before Christmas. A Code Pink announcement sparks panic, and soon the film fills with police officers, anxious parents, bystanders, media coverage, and a trail of misassumptions. It sounds like material for a genuinely tense film. Sadly, the execution never quite holds together.
Director: Arun Varma
Cast: Nivin Pauly, Lijomol Jose, Abhimanyu Shammy Thilakan, Sangeeth Prathap
It is clear that the seasoned writer duo Bobby-Sanjay were reaching for something like Traffic, which remains one of their strongest scripts. The similarities are easy to spot. There is a race against time, as several characters are pulled in by personal guilt or desperation, and a moral question lies underneath everything. But while Traffic felt precise and emotionally sharp, Baby Girl plays out like a scattered puzzle. A lot keeps happening, but very little stays with you.
The story places Sanal Mathew (Nivin Pauly) at the centre of the chaos. Sanal is a hospital attendant who becomes important after recalling a suspicious figure leaving the hospital. From there, the baby becomes less a person and more a misplaced parcel, passed along through a chain of coincidences involving migrant workers, a desperate brother, an abusive husband, a young couple who never wanted the child, and a police force that’s constantly one step behind. The writing piles incident upon incident, but emotional clarity is sacrificed along the way.
Among all these threads, the one character that truly registers is Rithu, played poignantly by Lijomol Jose. A woman trapped in an abusive marriage and devastated by repeated stillbirths, Rithu’s longing for motherhood gives the film its only solid emotional anchor. Lijomol brings honesty to the role, avoiding melodrama even when the writing pushes her towards it. In a film full of miscasting and half-baked performances, she’s the lone actor who stands out by simply feeling real.
Nivin, despite a recent uptick with Sarvam Maya, looks oddly detached here. Sanal seems designed as an echo of Sreenivasan’s character in Traffic, an ordinary man driven by conscience. But Sanal often feels like he has been inserted into the story rather than grown within it. He disappears for long stretches and then returns when the plot needs him. Even scenes meant to underline his moral drive struggle to land, weighed down by overwrought dialogue. The police angle does not help matters either. Rakesh (Abhimanyu Shammy Thilakan) is meant to be a sincere officer battling pressure from all sides, much like Anoop Menon’s role in Traffic. Instead, Abhimanyu's performance feels stiff and emotionally flat, with his monotonous voice modulation adding to the woes. The depiction of policing, too, often slips into something close to caricature, making it hard to take the investigation seriously.
Director Arun Varma presents the film in a style that feels strangely dated. There is a heavy reliance on melodrama, at times resembling a television serial more than a contemporary thriller. This is disappointing, especially since his previous film, Garudan, was at least consistently engaging, even if it was not particularly inventive. Here, the inability to spot cliches or rein in melodramatic beats hurts the film badly. Technically, too, it struggles. Shyjith Kumaran’s editing is jarring and Sam CS’s background score is disappointingly generic, echoing cues we’ve heard in countless other thrillers.
Beneath all this noise lies an interesting idea. Baby Girl places, side by side, two women shaped by very different circumstances. One is young, overwhelmed, and unsure if she wants the responsibility that has arrived too early. The other is older, emotionally starved, and desperate to care for a child she can finally call her own. The question the film circles is simple but heavy. Is motherhood defined by birth alone, or by the willingness to love and protect? Instead of allowing this conflict to unfold through quiet, difficult exchanges, the film wraps it in twists, coincidences, and chaos.
The dominant problem with Baby Girl is not what it wants to say, but how little of it survives once the dust settles. The film keeps reaching for the kind of emotional grip that once made Traffic unforgettable, but never finds a reason for us to stay invested, even as it becomes a slog at a modest runtime of just over two hours.