Babita Singh Reporting

Director: Ambiecka Pandit
Writer: Amita Vyas
Cast: Nimisha Sajayan (Babita “Baby” Singh), Anshuman Pushkar (Sharad Vashisht), Barun Sobti (Bansi Seni), Rajesh Kumar, Geetika Vidya Ohlyan, Sunita Rajwar

Babita Singh Reporting is, at its core, two stories running alongside each other. One is a crime investigation into the death of Bansi; the other is Babita’s coming-of-age as she begins to question the roles and expectations that have shaped her life. The interesting thing about the film is that neither track exists merely as a subplot to the other. The investigation becomes the trigger for Babita to step outside the boundaries she has lived within, making her personal transformation part of the film’s larger narrative movement. For the most part, this is a well-designed structure, even though the two spines don’t eventually arrive at an equally satisfying payoff.

Things that worked –

1. The world of the film

One of the things that works in the favour of the film is the way it creates its world without trying too hard to make it look like a film. This is particularly noticeable when Babita and her husband travel to his home-town. The houses, courtyards, roads, lanes and the overall layout of the place feel like spaces people actually inhabit rather than locations dressed up for the camera. There is nothing particularly picturesque or stylized about them, and that is precisely what makes them convincing. The film allows these spaces to retain their ordinariness—the slightly cluttered courtyards, the unremarkable houses, the roads and the way people occupy them—and in doing so, gives the setting a sense of specificity and credibility.

2. Patriarchy as Conditioning, Not Villainy

The film’s most nuanced choice is in the way it portrays the husband and, through him, patriarchy—not as something practiced by people who consciously want to be oppressive, but as something we inherit through the values, roles and behaviours we see growing up. His care and affection coexist with normalized expectations he has from their relationship, making the relationship feel recognizably human rather than constructed around a villain.

Overall, the film’s two-spine structure—the crime investigation and Babita’s personal coming-of-age—is another strong choice. The investigation gives the screenplay a natural mechanism to move Babita out of the life she has been accustomed to and into situations where she has to make decisions for herself. This allows her character arc to unfold alongside the plot rather than feeling like a separate track imposed on the crime story. For the most part, the progression from accommodation to agency is gradual, with each development in the investigation pushing her a little further outside the boundaries she has accepted for herself.

Here are a few suggestions for the film –

1. Thematic Mirroring: Babita and Bansi

The film could have found a stronger thematic connection between Babita and Bansi. Both characters are, in their own ways, struggling under the weight of societal expectations and the roles assigned to them. But the degree of that struggle is not the same. Babita is frustrated and constrained by these expectations, yet she is still able to push back against them and imagine a life beyond them. Bansi, on the other hand, has reached a much more desperate point—unable to reconcile the different expectations placed on him with what he wants for himself, he eventually sees no way out.

This mirroring would have also solved one of the film’s biggest emotional problems. Since the crime thriller ends not with a murderer but with a suicide, the emotional payoff depends on our ability to empathize with the victim. In a conventional crime thriller, we are used to investing in the investigation and then finding satisfaction in discovering the murderer. A suicide demands something different from the audience: it asks us to understand the emotional journey that led the character there. For Bansi, we surely come to know about his struggles, in pieces, as Babita talks to the wife, the brother, and his past love interest. Given we don’t have the first-hand interaction with him (may be through flashbacks), we look at Bansi largely from a distance, and our investment in his inner life remains limited. Had Bansi’s journey been developed alongside Babita’s, through the same thematic lens, the final revelation could have carried much greater emotional weight. We would not merely learn that Bansi died by suicide; we would understand how the pressures he was carrying had accumulated to a point that Babita’s journey never reaches.

In that version, the two characters become different outcomes of the same social conditioning. Babita finds the agency to resist the roles imposed on her; Bansi is unable to find that way out. One manages to imagine another possibility for herself; the other cannot. And it would have not only become a women’s story strained by societal pressures, but a large question in face of the humankind today.

2. The crime investigation should accumulate, not feel episodic

The crime thriller is where the film gradually loses its grip. Babita’s investigation often feels episodic—she discovers that someone is connected to Bansi, speaks to them, reaches a dead end and then moves on to the next person. The individual encounters may be interesting, but they don’t always feel as though they are building on one another or progressively narrowing the investigation. We keep moving, but the investigation itself doesn’t seem to move forward.

This becomes particularly problematic because the film eventually reveals that there was no murder at all. Had there been a murderer to uncover, the episodic structure could still have delivered a conventional payoff. But once the answer is suicide, the investigation needs to offer something else: each encounter should take us deeper into Bansi’s life, his relationships and the pressures that eventually led him there. Instead, the investigation sometimes feels more like a device for moving Babita through her character arc than a compelling investigation in its own right.

3. The husband’s character arc; too quick a realisation

One of the film’s most interesting writing choices is its decision not to make Babita’s husband an obvious antagonist. He is caring, affectionate and, by his own understanding, a good husband. His patriarchy exists in the smaller, normalized expectations of everyday marriage rather than in overt oppression. That makes him feel far more real—and more interesting—than the conventional “bad husband” we often see in stories about women breaking free. But somewhere along the way, the writing loses some of this grey-ness. His character becomes more clearly positioned against Babita, and by the end, his realization and attempt at reconciliation feel too quick. The film seems to suggest that a few days apart and a confrontation are enough to undo conditioning that has been embedded in him for years. I wouldn’t have wanted the husband to remain “bad” either; rather, I would suggest the film to acknowledge that good intentions and deeply ingrained patriarchy can coexist, and that recognizing the latter is the beginning of a much longer process, not a transformation completed within the span of the film.

As a whole, the film works on many fronts—the story structure, its character choices (particularly that of the husband), production design, scene design, and, most importantly, the decision to make its theme one of the major spines of the film. Where it loses some ground is in the crime investigation, which lacks a strong sense of rising tension. The investigation keeps moving, but rarely felt the possibilities narrowing or the mystery tightening its grip, which ultimately made the crime thread less compelling than the character journey.

—SM