Baby Do Die Do (2026) — An OK One-Time Watch With Twists You'll See Coming
Baby Do Die Do (2026) · ⭐⭐½ (2.5/5)
Dir. Nachiket Samant · Starring Huma Qureshi, Sikandar Kher, Chunky Panday, Seema Pahwa, Rachit Singh · 123 min · Hindi
Streaming: Netflix
*
The setup: As kids, twin sisters slip into an abandoned five-star hotel and witness a murder. The killer spots them. Baby — deaf and mute, marked by the anklet her sister tied around her ankle so she could always be found — survives. Her sister does not. Baby is then raised by P. M. Jain, the man she calls "Papa," who trains her as a contract killer with a single purpose: avenge her sister. Years later she works as a silent, efficient hitwoman in Mumbai, killing with an umbrella rigged to fire, while deflecting the attentions of Sidhu, the sweet-natured singer next door. Then a job goes sideways, a blackmailer surfaces, and the detective who has been circling her gets close enough to matter.
The verdict: OK. A fine one-time watch.
Huma Qureshi is the reason this works. She plays Baby almost entirely without dialogue — the character communicates through sign, expression and physicality — and she is genuinely good at it. The stillness is the performance. Where a lesser film would have her mugging for the cheap seats, Qureshi holds Baby's flat calm and lets the violence do the talking. Chunky Panday as Papa is sharp casting: he plays the affectionate father figure with just enough real warmth that you stop questioning the arrangement, which is precisely what the story needs. Seema Pahwa's Inspector Anjum Khan is the most interesting supporting idea in the film — a cop who is neither useless nor incorruptible — though the script never spends enough time on her.
The film also has a genuine identity. It is pulpy and proud of it, committing fully to its own ridiculousness: an umbrella gun, an anklet as an emotional through-line, a villain defined by a missing ear that finally ties him to the night everything started. Nachiket Samant keeps it moving, and at 123 minutes it rarely sags.
Where it falls down is the writing, and specifically the twists. They are predictable. The film's central reveal — that the surviving twin may not be Baby at all — is the sort of thing an attentive viewer clocks long before the screenplay says it out loud, and the movie keeps waving the clues around as though they were subtle: the anklet, the mother's confusion, the way "Baby" responds to sound. By the time it lands, it is confirmation rather than revelation. The same goes for the Papa betrayal, telegraphed so hard in the back half that the final confrontation plays as an obligation instead of a shock. A thriller needs at least one turn you did not buy a ticket for.
The action is serviceable rather than memorable. Individual kills are staged with flair, but the climactic hotel fight is cut into incoherence, and the film never quite decides whether it wants to be a grim character study or a gleeful genre romp. It settles somewhere in the middle — entertained, but never gripped. There is also a sequel hook in the last few minutes (a cameo plus a photo with a location pin) that feels optimistic for a film critics liked considerably more than audiences did.
Bottom line: Baby Do Die Do is a decent-looking, decently-acted pulpy revenge thriller carried by a strong central performance and let down by a script that cannot keep a secret. Worth one evening on Netflix. You will enjoy it while it is on, you will probably never think about it again, and you will have guessed the ending well before it arrives.