Baida review: Bad acting, subpar VFX, and an absent plot sink this vanity project that may be harmful to viewers' health

Baida review: Sudhanshu Rai's vanity projects fails to be either scary or cutting edge, annoying the viewer with its inefficacy.

Baida

Cast: Sudhanshu Rai, Sourabh Raaj Jain, Tarun Khanna

Director: Puneet Sharma

Rating: ★

Ah, the good old days of childhood. Make-believe worlds, imaginary characters- all of us have done that at some point in life. It’s cute as a child. It’s bad news as adults. Baida is being touted as a ‘sci-fi-supernatural-thriller’. My one-line review? It’s none of those three.

Baida review: Sourabh Raaj Jain plays an ineffective antagonist in the film.

Directed by Puneet Sharma, this film has been co-produced and written by Sudhanshu Rai, who also casts himself as the lead. It feels like a vanity project. Every frame of the film features him. It wouldn’t have been a problem if he had the screen presence or acted well enough to hook the viewers. But he makes us feel nothing about the situation on screen. That one expression remains fixed. (

What is Baida about

The story revolves around a man trapped in a time loop due to an encounter with a pishaach (played by Sourabh Raaj Jain) in a forest. How he escapes is expected to be the plot here.

Merely throwing around words like ‘pishaach’ ‘time’ ‘space’ ‘dimension’ isn’t enough to craft a convincing thriller. The story starts off randomly, goes haywire, and ultimately has an abrupt ending. There’s no thought put into convincing us about an effective backstory.

How the film flounders

The direction feels very amateur, bordering on a film school project. A film like this needed viewers to be on the edge of their seats, anticipating what happens next. But the plot development is a joke here.

The subpar VFX also doesn’t help. Usually, even that helps bad horror films. But the Photoshop-level editing here leaves a lot to be desired.

After a point, the exasperation at the boredom gives way to laughter. I am pretty sure that wasn’t a reaction the makers expected. But the film is irreparably damaged around the interval, and laughing at the ridiculousness of it all is all that one can do.

In the acting department, Sudhanshu needs to take up some acting classes asap. Sourabh Raaj Jain is the antagonist, and is as menacing as a duck.

Tarun Khanna is cast as a scientist-like figure and treated in the film as comic relief. (I hope I got this right. I couldn’t comprehend beyond a point because I was chuckling). Overall, Baida is a badly crafted film. It never manages to take off.