Baramulla

The Weight of the Snow

There’s a kind of silence that belongs only to hard winter. It doesn't soften the world so much as bury it. That dense, airless quiet is what haunts Aditya Suhas Jambhale’s *Baramulla* more than any ghost does. Right from the opening, the film understands the mood it wants: a single flower bud trembling in the snow, a pause held long enough for you to expect violence, then a boy named Shoaib drifting into view before vanishing after a local magic show. Jambhale lets the cold do the first stretch of storytelling.

Jambhale came into this after *Article 370*, so subtlety is not exactly the first quality people associate with him. When I heard he was making a supernatural thriller about missing children in Kashmir, I wondered whether the politics would just be window dressing for horror beats. The answer is messier than that. *Baramulla* is really two films laid over each other: a procedural about a militant kidnapping network and a haunted-house story in which the dead refuse to be tidied away. Sometimes the overlap is potent. Sometimes the metaphor presses too hard.



Manav Kaul does a lot to keep the film grounded. As DSP Ridwaan Sayyed, the investigator sent to Baramulla, he carries himself like a man already halfway crushed by what he's seen. It isn't just acted exhaustion; his whole frame seems to sink under the winter layers. The part also has personal resonance. Kaul was born in Baramulla before his family moved to Madhya Pradesh, and that history—something he has explored before in his novel *Rooh*—gives his presence an extra ache. When he studies the snowbound landscape, he looks like someone taking inventory of absences.

Once Ridwaan brings his family into that sprawling, decaying house watched over by a mute attendant, the inside story starts echoing the unrest outside. One of the film's best stretches follows his wife Gulnaar, played by Bhasha Sumbli with a taut, lived-in anxiety, as she traces a thread of cold air toward a clue. Jambhale doesn't lean on cheap orchestral jolts there. Saurabh Goswami's camera uses the cramped geometry of the Kashmiri home—the narrow passages, low ceilings, long shadowed corridors—to squeeze the air out of the scene. Sumbli, herself Kashmiri and filming in brutal cold shortly after giving birth, gives the supernatural material a human center it badly needs.



Where it starts to wobble is in the back half. As the mystery opens up, Jambhale grows less interested in dread and more interested in stating his metaphor outright. The ghosts become unmistakable stand-ins for Kashmiri Pandits driven into exile in the 1990s, and the movie's earlier uncertainty gives way to a much more declarative political argument. The Hindu’s Anuj Kumar was right to say that "when the fog subsides, the bombast of the 'us vs them' narrative becomes discernible." The line between haunting and lecture gets thinner and thinner, and by the third act the white-tulip imagery has been pushed about as far as it can go.

Still, I couldn't shake the craft. The sound design is especially precise—every creak in the boards, every far-off valley echo, every hush between lines feels calibrated to make you glance behind you. Even when the script starts spelling itself out, the atmosphere keeps doing real work.



I don't think *Baramulla* fully lands as pure horror, and it's far too burdened by historical pain to function as an easy weekend thriller. But maybe that discomfort is the point. The film never lets the past sit quietly, because the place it is about doesn't get that luxury either. It's an uneven movie, yes, but in its coldest, stillest passages it catches something sad and stubborn about a landscape where history keeps rising back through the snow.