Baby (2023) Review

Watching Baby feels like being caught in the middle of a heated argument between two lovers. You can't understand why they have to be so dramatic and make such outrageous statements. You just wish they'd stop making a scene and take a moment to reflect.

But for Baby's young, passionate couple Vaishnavi (Vaishnavi Chaitanya) and Anand (Anand Deverakonda), "complicated" is their starting point. In one of the film's pivotal scenes, a drunk Vaishnavi calls Anand and threatens to break his heart. Anand, who is feeling guilty about slut-shaming her and nearly hitting her with his chappal the previous night, tries to appease her and win her back. But Vaishnavi is ambivalent. She has had a taste of freedom at college. Why must she feel bound to her schooldays' lover? She is heady from all the attention she has been getting ever since she discarded her basti-girl salwar-kurta look and got a makeover. Viraj (Viraj Ashwin), the hottest guy in college, is into her. Anand, meanwhile, is still an auto driver.

Baby has the typical "modern girl, conservative boy" setup of a new-age Telugu romance - I'm thinking of Sammathame, Urvasivo Rakshasivo. But like these movies, it can't quite figure out what to do with this modern girl, except to shame and punish her for doing the things that men have been doing for generations. Because nothing is as easy a target for character assassination as a woman who smokes and drinks - nothing is so implicitly immoral.

Writer and director Sai Rajesh, who also wrote Colour Photo, a movie with similar twisted love setups, makes Baby's protagonists needlessly complex and divisive. They get cornered by their actions and are forced to react in painfully immature ways. One of them, for instance, figures that the only way to hide their cheating is to cheat some more. Another feels that the only way to move on is to become nihilistic. Someone cuts their wrist at some point.

With dialogues that aren't particularly convincing, Baby's melodrama feels manufactured - like a blatant attempt to create controversy and generate some much-dreaded "Twitter discourse". What better PR campaign than to rile up audiences "Arjun Reddy-style", into arguing endlessly about whether Vaishnavi was right, or who deserved her fate?

From the online chatter, it is clear that Baby has given license to roadside Romeos to openly unload their frustrations about women, and live vicariously through Anand as he repeatedly shames Vaishnavi. (A video that surfaced on Twitter shows audiences chanting cuss words at on-screen Vaishnavi).

Baby is frustrating to watch in the way it treats its characters. But its young cast put on earnest performances, making you forget and forgive its somewhat ridiculous dialogue. Vaishnavi Chaitanya pours life into her lines like no other recent heroine has, and steals every scene. She might just be the only reason to watch the film. Anand Deverakonda is earnest as well, but his delivery of some of the movie's most overwrought lines ("I love you Vaishnavi, but I want to kill you"), inadvertently evokes laughter. When he cries, we don't feel sorry; we titter.

A decade-younger version of me might have had the patience to endure Baby's self-destructive protagonists. But now, it is much harder to take its writing seriously. It feels as alienating and incomprehensible as a Gen-Z conversation might sound to a Boomer. This implies that there is in fact a target audience that might enjoy this film and connect to it. For me, no thanks, baby.