Horrors of the land, horrors of the mind and horrors of the past coalesce in Baramulla. The result is an intriguing concoction which may often feel unique, but also one that makes for an uneven ride.
Set against the potent backdrop of Kashmir — as is evident from its unequivocal title — Baramulla explores the historically ravaged land where the terror of the present and the trauma of the past co-exist on an everyday basis, one often seeping into the other.
The film, that is now streaming on Netflix, opens with a shot of a single white tulip blooming against the equally pristine background of the snow-covered land of Baramulla. A child named Shoaib is about to pluck the flower when he is interrupted by a voice calling out his name. Minutes later, Shoaib disappears from a street magic act gone wrong.
With the tulip becoming a metaphor for innocence lost and the growing number of children going missing from the valley — Shoaib, the son of a powerful local politician being one of them — top cop Ridwaan Sayyed (Manav Kaul) is put in charge. Sayyed has his own demons to battle. That includes an inadvertent killing of a young boy in a police encounter, a fractured relationship with his teenaged daughter (Noorie, played by Arista Mehta) and being tagged an infidel by a large section of his community for donning fatigues and enforcing the law of the land on all equally.
Making the journey from Reasi to Baramulla isn’t easy for Ridwaan and his family, with their new (old) house — which does a lot more than just creak at night — adding to the predicament they find themselves in. Soon, Noorie, along with her mother Gulnaar (Bhasha Sumbli) and younger brother Ayaan (Rohaan Singh) start experiencing an otherworldly presence, even as the caretaker of the house keeps inexplicably disappearing with plates of food into a locked room by day and night. Ridwaan — pressured by the disappearance of more children in a valley already weighed down by militancy — concentrates more on tackling his problems outside. Until they start hitting close to home.
Two years ago, director Aditya Suhas Jambhale’s Article 370 — front lined by Yami Gautam Dhar — wove a fictional story into the days leading up to the abrogation of Article 370, that ended the special status of Jammu and Kashmir. Here Jambhale — aided by Aditya Dhar, who has produced both Baramulla and Article 370, as well as co-writer Monal Thaakar — melds the real and the supernatural to reimagine a story detailing the horrific fallout of generational trauma and displacement. It is an unconventional approach that deserves to be praised. Its subtle and nuanced tone and treatment, for the most part, also helps pull Baramulla back from falling into the category of recent propaganda films playing out in a similar setting.
Brimming with allegory and referencing the past to hold a mirror to the present, Baramulla takes time to find its feet. The film is a slow-burn watch that, to be honest, could test the patience of many. The valley’s state of unrest and its political subtext — stone pelting, young boys being recruited by terrorist groups and transported across the border to train, the exodus of Kashmiri Pandits in the ’90s after losing life and land — finds itself being echoed in the supernatural occurrences that the Sayyed family finds itself in the middle of.
The atmospherics contribute heavily to the impact of the narrative. The house is a character in itself and Arnold Fernandes’s lens captures the darker side of Kashmir, with the visual of the fog gliding on the lake swallowing up those who ride their boats into it, being an overpowering metaphor for what takes place in the film.
Baramulla, however, often gets monotonous. Long stretches of nothingness are followed by sequences playing out in rinse-repeat mode. The film seems to be saving it for all the sucker-punch climax, and while most of it works, the final twist somehow doesn’t land with the same impact that its makers probably expected it to. Still, this is a film — with a superlative Manav Kaul leading from the front — that makes you ponder over a terrifying past, and a far more horrifying present. And not just within Baramulla.
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