Baby Girl Review: A Dated Thriller Chasing Yesterday’s Urgency
Malayalam cinema has often used urgency as a narrative tool, trusting that a ticking clock can heighten both tension and emotion. Baby Girl arrives with a similar confidence, anchoring itself to a crisis that unfolds within a single day and multiple intersecting lives. On paper, it promises a morally charged thriller shaped by loss, responsibility and difficult choice.On screen, however it plays out as a familiar exercise that never quite updates itself for the present moment.
Directed by Arun Varma and written by Bobby–Sanjay, Baby Girl is built around a high stakes premise: a newborn baby goes missing from a hospital, setting off a chain reaction involving the police, hospital staff, families, and strangers whose lives briefly intersect. The narrative unfolds within a compressed timeline, clearly aiming for the race against time tension that once made Traffic a landmark film. But what once felt innovative now feels overly familiar.
The plot follows Sanal (Nivin Pauly), a hospital attendant whose suspicion turns him into an important link in the investigation. Alongside this runs the story of the baby’s young biological parents, still unsure if they were ever ready for parenthood, and a parallel emotional arc involving Rithu (Lijomol Jose), a woman devastated by repeated stillbirths and trapped in an abusive relationship. The film wants these threads to collide into a larger moral question about motherhood, unfortunately, the film rarely pauses long enough to let that question breathe.
The narrative structure clearly echoes Traffic, the film that once redefined Malayalam thrillers.The blueprint is familiar, but what once felt sharp and emotionally precise now feels mechanical. The screenplay keeps piling incidents one after another, but emotional clarity gets lost in the process. The baby, ironically, becomes more of a narrative device than a living presence, passed along as the plot demands.
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Among the ensemble, Lijomol Jose stands out with a performance rooted in emotional honesty. She resists easy melodrama and grounds Rithu’s desperation in quiet restraint. Her scenes offer the film its only moments of genuine weight. By contrast, Nivin Pauly’s Sanal feels curiously underwritten. The character drifts in and out of the narrative, often appearing only to remind us of his importance. There is little emotional progression, and even less room for performance. It feels less like a role shaped by necessity and more like one shaped by obligation.
The police investigation too, struggles to convince. Abhimanyu Shammy Thilakan’s officer is written with sincerity but performed with stiffness, and the procedural detailing relies on familiar visual shorthand,CCTV footage, control rooms, radio chatter without building real tension.
Technically, Baby Girl struggles to feel contemporary. The editing by Shyjith Kumaran lacks fluidity, often disrupting rather than heightening suspense. Sam CS’s background score is loud and predictable, signalling emotions instead of trusting the audience to find them. Visually, the film carries a dated sensibility, with dramatic beats staged more like a television serial than a contemporary Malayalam thriller.
What weakens Baby Girl most is its reluctance to embrace stillness. The film keeps rushing forward, afraid that silence might dilute its urgency. But it is in those quieter spaces, especially in the emotional conflict between two women shaped by loss and uncertainty that the story briefly comes alive. Sadly, those moments are too few and arrive too late.
By the time the dust settles, Baby Girl feels neither gripping enough as a thriller nor probing enough as a moral drama. It moves fast, speaks loudly, and yet leaves behind very little. For a film built around the fragility of new life, it’s strangely uninterested in making us truly care.
