WARNING: THIS ARTICLE CONTAINS MAJOR SPOILERS
Aditya Suhas Jambhale’s Baramulla exists at the intersection of genre, where real-life horrors combine with the supernatural kind, and the solution is, ultimately, a gunfight. A film of rich atmosphere and competent craft gives way in its ending to a hodgepodge of ideas, not all of which really work in combination. But the layering of different themes, meanings, and images does make the Hindi film interesting to unpack, especially since there is at least some ambiguity in its climax.
Plot-wise, DSP Ridwaan Sayyed’s search for a string of missing children leads him to the titular Baramulla in the Kashmir valley, and while he’s in situ, he and his wife, Gulnaar, and their children Noorie and Ayaan, are housed in a property that quickly reveals itself to be haunted. How are the haunted-house scares connected to the region’s very real history? And what do the present-day disappearances have to do with the terrible exile of that region’s people? These are the most compelling questions that the film sometimes struggles to answer in its chaotic third act.
Ridwaan Becomes A Believer
Despite the extremely obvious supernatural happenings occurring in and around the property that Ridwaan and his family are staying in, the policeman nonetheless dismisses the notion of ghosts and instead doubles down on the more corporeal side of his investigations into the missing children. He refuses to accept, as his junior would have him do, that the magician whose chest a missing boy never emerged from is the real culprit, but he also refuses to consider the possibility that anything else may be afoot.
While Ridwaan is working, Noorie, Ayaan, and eventually Gulnaar are troubled by visions and jump scares that seem to have a deeper meaning. Eventually, Noorie follows the house help, Iqbaal, to a hidden section of the property, and promptly disappears, causing more friction between Ridwaan and Gulnaar since the former believes she has become the victim of a radical extremist named Khalid, while the latter believes she has succumbed to a deeper-rooted evil.
Khalid has been carrying out an operation at the behest of a mysterious boss to kidnap young children in order to radicalise them and send them to Pakistan to fight for the homeland and rebuild a new Kashmir. The CIA calls this “diaper militancy”; in other words, brainwashing children so young that their loyalty to the cause never wavers. However, Khalid claims that the children they were attempting to kidnap disappeared before they could be grabbed. Junaid, Khalid’s conspirator, is due to start the “harvesting” by sacrificing his own nephew to the cause. However, Ridwaan, thanks to Gulnaar having explained the plot to him, is able to intervene. But his success is short-lived, since the young boy disappears into a void, leaving behind only a lock of hair like the previous victims.
The House is the Key
The ending of Baramulla reveals the backstory of the haunted house, which allows us to figure out the connection between the past and present-day storylines. At one time, the property had housed a Kashmiri Pandit family, Hindus who were resistant to the idea of Kashmir’s conversion into an Islamic state. Ridwaan’s family has, throughout the movie, been seeing the trapped spectres of Mansi and Kamalanand, their daughter Eela, Eela’s friend Zainab, and the family dog.
In a largely very good late sequence, we see how the entire family was attacked and subsequently killed by Islamic extremists, including the dog. While Eela may well have survived thanks to her mother’s bravery, since Mansi lopped off her hair to disguise her (hence the locks being left behind in all of the “kidnappings”), she was betrayed by Zainab, who gave them away to the Muslims.
However, the ghostly entities that have remained in the house ever since have not been haunting the place, per se, but using their supernatural influence to protect the children that Khalid was attempting to radicalise. Ridwaan and Gulnaar’s daughter, Noorie, was one of them, as she was becoming swayed thanks to the trauma of seeing her father gun down a child in their past. This is also why Junaid’s nephew disappeared; he was prevented from being radicalised.
The Final Showdown
While this is going on, Ridwaan and the police are under attack by Junaid and his men for interfering in the “harvesting”. As the story of the house becomes clearer to Gulnaar, she becomes possessed by the spirit of Mansi, who helps her fight back against the attackers. She takes down the mysterious, thus-far unidentified boss whom Khalid and Junaid were working for and often seen communicating with, and Ridwaan kills Junaid.
It is revealed that the secretive boss was in fact a grown-up Zainab, the little girl who had betrayed the family in the first place. This is confirmed through the tell-tale scar on her forehead, and Ridwaan calling the boss’s phone from Junaid’s, which sets Zainab’s ringing in his hand. The CIA was right about “diaper militancy” – Zainab, who was evidently brainwashed by Islamic extremists as a child, did indeed remain loyal to the cause throughout her life.
With Zainab’s death, all of the “missing” children, including Noorie, are freed from the protection of the house and its entities and reunited with their families.