‘Babita Singh Reporting’: Woman, beyond the khaki

Workforce liberation has long been a myth for the Indian bahu. You step out of domesticity into the workforce, but — conveniently enough — no one picks up their share of the work back home. You return tired only to pick up utensils after your husband eats, serve seconds even when you are the guest, laugh along with fat-shaming jokes and wear saris in colours your mother-in-law likes.

The office may give you a desk, designation and salary; the kitchen remains firmly in your name.

Deceptively billed as a murder thriller, ‘Babita Singh Reporting’ arrives with a rather different insistence: to make the viewer reckon with the emotional labour that comes with being a woman — that invisible, unclocked shift that is so quickly mistaken for wilful benevolence.

The emotional labour here is carried by ASI Babita “Baby” Singh (Nimisha Sajayan, simply divine), a newbie cop at a Bhopal police station, conditioned to keep contradictory thoughts in the same little room.

She wants to prove herself and get opportunities, yet cannot stand up for them; she has learnt that asking for space means taking more than she is entitled to. Her anukampa niyukti — compassionate appointment after her father’s demise — lands like a small, familiar jab every time.

Back home too, sly micro-aggressions await: she has not visited her in-laws in two years; a lady cop’s job is hardly respectable; a woman ought to know where her real duties lie. In small-town India’s suburbia, patriarchy need not raise its voice.

So Baby takes the fall for a senior, for whom she also shoots Instagram reels, earning a two-week suspension to visit her in-laws in Rewa with husband Sharad (Anshuman Pushkar). There, her mother-in-law (Sunita Rajwar) has her organising the god-bharai of her sister-in-law (Priya Yadav).

Back home, Baby briefly reconnects with her peculiar childhood friend Bansi (Barun Sobti), a jittery, eccentric idol-maker, locally famed for his Dasehra Ravans. When he is found dead, she takes it upon herself to solve the crime, all while juggling the investigation with household duties and taunts, the weight of grief, and the occasional oddity back at the station — forever remaining the custodian of “ghar ki izzat”.

Through moody cinematography, Kabir’s dohas, jabs at weight and caste, glittering festive lanes and suffocating domestic walls, director Ambiecka Pandit and writer Amita Vyas map not merely a naïve investigation, but grief within a social structure where a woman is quickly branded courageous — almost never a compliment.

A heartbreaking Sobti makes the most of little screentime, though the script barely explores Bansi or his bond with Baby. Pushkar is quietly menacing, his calm microaggressions practically gaslighting you through the screen. Priyanka Setia, briefly seen as Bansi’s wife, captures another suffocation of womanhood.

But this is Sajayan’s film through and through. She plays Baby with reckless surrender, as though she has been here before. In the isolating catharsis of showers. In a mortifyingly still stare beyond the camera. In the flinch every time someone calls her Baby instead of Babita. And in the fact that Baby knows better than to correct them.

Convenient clues, shaky logic, continuity slips, lacklustre dialogue and a middling crime troupe keep it from being a sharper thriller. Yet the potent story beneath the story, helmed by Sajayan and anchored by moody camerawork, keeps it compelling.

By the end, the real story is not how Bansi died, but how many little deaths women must endure before calling a life their own.

In its lingering silences and small rebellions, ‘Babita Singh Reporting’ finds its most haunting truth — sometimes, the hardest thing to escape is not the house, but the life you have been taught to call home.