A heart-stopping, cautionary thriller

Johnson Thomas

Based on a rare real-life incident, this film by Vinod Kapri tries to do a ‘Trapped’ on a two-year-old girl and it plays out rather implausibly even though there are enough heart-in-the-mouth moments to keep you on the edge of your seats.

Baby’s Day Out and Home Alone are films that caught the fancy of moviegoers because of the well-realised comic potential of those constructs. Kapri’s movie though attempts to be a cautionary tale for couples/parents who fail to realise the impact of their dysfunctions. So, the mood is deliberately somber and scary and there’s no relief available till the child is rescued after an entire day of near life-threatening incidents.

Pihu (Myra Vishwakarma), the delightful little girl central to this story, wakes up alone in her bed and finds her mother in a ‘dead’ sleep. The previous day was her birthday, the celebrations for which went on late into the night. Signs of revelry are strewn all across the house – a modern duplex flat (higher-up in a high-rise) with all the necessary appliances that could be hazardous to an unsupervised child of two. With her mother in ‘nunu’ as she calls it, she has a field day rampaging through every nook and corner of the messed up home. Her situation is fraught with obviously contrived risks. When she is hungry she raids the fridge, locks herself inside it and once she manages to let herself out, takes out the bread and jam and makes a royal mess.

The iron’s on and she doesn’t know what to do about it. She puts her chappati in the microwave and ends up burning it and then does the same on the gas. More such perilous events get added on in an attempt to trump up the tension. She even climbs up the balcony railing and nearly gives the viewer a heart attack. It’s quite a scary proposition if you believe that a two-year-old (even a precocious one) would be able to drum up so much trouble. And it also leaves you questioning the parenting capabilities of the griping couple who thinks nothing of leaving the balcony door unlocked, the gas main turned on, the iron ‘live’ and several other no-no’s which would have made any self-respecting parent bow their heads in abject misery. 

This sort of a small-budget movie with a digital camera and a kid let loose in a flat, maybe an economically viable proposition but it’s not an artistically fluent one. The camerawork is fidgety at best and the contrivances tend to implausible for the most part. That Kapri managed to sell the ‘child at risk’ proposition creepily enough, is commendable in itself.