Babita Singh Reporting Review: ★★★★☆ (4/5)
Babita Singh Reporting works best as a coming-of-rage origin story rather than a tightly plotted crime drama, powered almost entirely by Nimisha Sajayan’s riveting, deeply authentic central performance.
Rating: ★★★★☆ (4/5)
Platform: Prime Video
Genre: Crime Drama
Director: Ambiecka Pandit
Cast: Nimisha Sajayan, Barun Sobti, Anshuman Pushkar
Babita Singh Reporting introduces us to Babita Singh, known to everyone as Baby, a police officer who has spent her entire life bending over backwards to please the people around her.
Whether it is a self-serving boss at work or her own family’s endless expectations at home, Baby has learned to comply rather than resist. That pattern of quiet people-pleasing finally cracks when a tragic incident forces her into a rebellion that has clearly been building for a long time.
The story kicks off when Baby, a Bhopal-based cop, is pressured into taking the blame for her boss’s mistake at work, accepting a two-week suspension in exchange for the leave she needs to visit her hometown of Rewa for a family function.
Once there, her childhood friend Bansi tells her he urgently needs to talk to her. Before that conversation can happen, he turns up dead. Convinced the man arrested for the crime is not actually responsible, Baby begins her own unofficial investigation, all while juggling daughter-in-law duties and a husband who is less than thrilled about her sleuthing.
What makes the film genuinely compelling is how naturally it captures the everyday manipulations of patriarchy. A boss who throws his subordinate under the bus without a second thought.
A husband who worries about his wife’s thyroid levels while casually body-shaming her in private and in front of others. None of this is presented as dramatic villainy. It is shown as the quiet, normalized behavior that women like Baby have learned to live with, which makes it land even harder as a viewer.
Nimisha Sajayan is the true heart of this film, delivering a performance that echoes the slow-burning rage she brought to The Great Indian Kitchen. She captures Baby’s journey from someone conditioned to comply into someone willing to risk everything for the truth with real authenticity.
Whether she is nervously navigating a dangerous situation or suddenly summoning fierce, performed bravado to scare off a group of drug addicts threatening her, Sajayan makes every beat of that transformation feel completely genuine.
The film also does a good job weaving Baby’s domestic responsibilities into her investigation, showing her constantly inventing errands and excuses just to buy herself time to dig deeper into her friend’s murder.
Anshuman Pushkar, playing her husband, deserves credit too for a tricky role, portraying a man who knows exactly how to perform modern, understanding masculinity while still quietly enforcing patriarchal expectations behind closed doors.
Where the film stumbles a bit is in the actual mechanics of its murder mystery. Several plot points rely a little too heavily on convenient coincidences, from key suspects turning out to be connected to Baby’s own in-laws to her explanations to her husband feeling more like exposition than natural conversation.
The final reveal about what actually happened to Bansi also risks feeling like a slight letdown compared to the emotional journey that led there.
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Visually, the film is beautifully shot, turning cluttered homes, busy markets, and quiet bylanes into genuinely cinematic spaces. That said, despite this visual flair, the small town setting does not always feel essential to the story itself, and much of what unfolds could plausibly have happened anywhere.
Even with these narrative shortcomings, Babita Singh Reporting stands out as one of the better Hindi films of the year, thanks largely to its craft and its unforgettable central character. The internal journey here shines far brighter than the external plot mechanics ever manage to.
While it may not join the ranks of the genre’s very best crime dramas, its lead character certainly earns her place among them, and it is easy to imagine wanting to see more of ASI Babita Singh’s story down the line.
Babita Singh Reporting is now streaming on Prime Video.