The film doesn’t deliver on its own promise, but it does leave behind the sense that, with more conviction, this story could have been really subversive and beautifully sinister.
Baapu movie review(2 / 5)
There is a powerful idea at the heart of Baapu, written and directed by Daya. The film navigates a morally ambiguous terrain, where desperation forces people into decisions that defy ethical norms. It sets itself up as a biting dark comedy, holding a mirror to the struggles of the farming community, yet ultimately hesitates to embrace its own cynicism. What’s clear in Baapu is a lack of faith in its treatment. What should have been a relentless descent into amorality instead dithers, tangled in sentimental storytelling that blunts its sharpest edges.
Director: Daya
Cast: Brahmaji, Aamani, Dhanya Balakrishna, Sudhakar Reddy, Mani Aegurla
Set in a small Telangana town, Baapu follows Mallanna (Brahmaji), a farmer facing an ultimatum to clear all his debts. The only viable escape from his financial ruin is through the Rythu Bheema insurance payout which, however, poses a threat to his or his elderly father’s (Sudhakar Reddy) life. With no way out, his family is left contemplating the unspeakable. It’s a provocative premise, treading a fine line between black humour and tragedy, one that promises a gripping exploration of necessity and amorality. However, the film doesn’t fully commit to this tension, often slipping into the familiar tropes of melodramatic poverty porn.
The film’s greatest strength lies in its dark comic tone. The early portions work beautifully, drawing humour from the absurdity of the situation while maintaining an undercurrent of despair. There’s an engaging balance between irony and empathy, where the audience simultaneously laughs at the characters’ predicament and recoils from its grim inevitability. But just as it begins to establish its own identity, Baapu retreats into emotional manipulation, throwing in overwrought sentimentality that clashes with its own thesis.
Sudhakar Reddy is undeniably the standout performer. His portrayal of the wily yet vulnerable grandfather is magnetic, though it carries a sense of familiarity, as he played a strikingly similar role in Balagam. The film positions him as its heart, yet never fully explores the transformation his predicament should inspire. It is a missed opportunity because there is something inherently disturbing about a family conspiring against its own patriarch, a theme ripe for a more brutal take. That grey area between desperation and amorality needed a razor-sharp treatment. Instead, Baapu softens its blows.
Brahmaji, as Mallanna, embodies the crushing weight of helplessness with an impressive physicality. While his Telangana dialect falters, his body language compensates, lending depth to a man torn between survival and morality. Aamani, as his wife, complements him well, yet neither performance is allowed the full space to evolve. The film flirts with the idea of transformation—that corruption, once embraced, spreads and takes over your mind—but ultimately resists pushing its characters to their limits. When the interval scene teases a full-blown descent into darkness, you brace yourself for the inevitable plunge. It never comes.
The cinematography by Vasu Pandem is quietly effective, capturing the rhythms of village life with an observational simplicity reminiscent of his work in Pareshan. His lens finds poetry in the mundane, grounding the film’s thematic weight in tangible, everyday images. In contrast, RR Dhruvan’s score struggles to maintain consistency, wavering between sleek, ironic undertones and grand, overwrought emotional cues. The film’s tonal missteps are most evident in its music, where a biting, satirical moment is often undercut by a swelling violin that demands you feel a certain way. The fine transition between both tones is glaringly missing.
Perhaps I found the film’s most exciting metaphor in the grandfather’s repeated outings to defecate. The act, so mundane, becomes a running commentary on transience, illustrating how death arrives with the same inevitability as a bodily function. In a particularly sharp moment, the film equates excretion with fortune, suggesting that, with a little luck, life can turn around just as easily as it crashes. These moments of brilliance made the film’s surrender to sentimentality all the more frustrating.
Ultimately, Baapu is a film that could have been extraordinary had it trusted its own cynicism. Daya constructs a world that is primed for a ruthless, pitch-black satire, but then hesitates, afraid of alienating our audiences with the film’s ambitious surgical grim. The result is a film that engages but never fully satisfies, offering glimpses of brilliance before retreating into safer, more conventional territory.
News Credit: Cinema Express
