The title for Nachiket Samant’s film is at first perplexing. But then, once I saw what they were trying to do, I smirked. An English transliteration of the protagonist’s name, Baby Karmarkar — how amused one might be by the pun might dictate how much they end up enjoying Samant’s film – because it’s full of dour, made-in-Mumbai humour. 

Baby (Huma Qureshi, also producer with brother/actor Saqib Saleem) is a deaf/mute female assassin, whose umbrella doubles up as a sneaky pistol. Exploiting Mumbai’s crowded spaces, Baby slips in, kills her target, and slips out. Thanks to the blinders that Mumbai residents have put on, it takes a while for most people to realise there’s a corpse next to them. It’s a smooth, nifty way to get the job done. In the film’s first scene, the makers introduce Baby’s modus operandi inside a Mumbai local. 

Samant’s film belongs to the tiny sub-genre of crime-comedies set in Mumbai, which have found their own stamp to discover  the ordinary. Chinmay Mandlekar’s Inspector Zende (2025), Vijay Maurya’s Mast Mein Rehneka! (2023), Vasan Bala’s Monica! O My Darling (2024) and Rajesh Krishnan’s Lootcase (2020) are some predecessors to Samant’s film, which found an underdog in an ordinary Marathi manoos. In Baby Do Die Do, the protagonist is a woman, who flips her handicap into her strength. It’s a terrific cover story, if she’s found in a place she’s not supposed to be in. Her sign language makes her an automatic “pity case” in the eyes of most people.

The duo........

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