Baby’s Day Out without the humour
Who would want to watch a baby cry? Nobody, and that’s what dooms Vinod Kapri’s silly and sadistic film Pihu, where a little girl walks precariously around an apartment, unwatched and un-cared for. The idea of anything in a house being a potential threat could have been made into a watchable short, but this is feature-length torture. It’s just 90 minutes of nanny-cam footage, with the viewer knowing all the while that nothing can really happen to the child at least until the end.
Things happen to young Pihu — played by Myra Vishwakarma, an adorable Tweety-Bird of a child — but none of these appears dangerous, even though the filmmakers amp up the horror, and shoot geysers and irons as sinisterly as possible.
The film opens on the morning after Pihu’s birthday party, which we hear during the opening credits. She gets up and tries to wake her mother, who cannot be woken — though the film is so loud and sadistic I often wondered if it might indeed rouse the dead.
Pihu immediately finds herself in peril as she tackles staircases, stools and sleeping pills. Her father is travelling, but keeps calling to talk to his wife. Her lack of response doesn’t faze him. All he wants to stress is that Pihu’s mother switch the iron off… or else.
This entire film is predicated on ‘or elses,’ every scene showing a fresh terror — cleaning fluid, an easily climbed balcony railing, and to me the most obscene bit of audience manipulation, literally dangling a child from a height to force fear into the viewer.
This is Baby’s Day Out without humour, and Trapped with a pint-sized Rajkummar Rao. It is a wannabe-horror version of Home Alone that makes no sense as a film — unless the producers are planning to launch a line of baby monitors. The child constantly tries to clean, sweep things, serve her mother, as if programmed for chores like a little mini-maid.
Infants deserve better.