Baida Movie Ending Explained And Recap: What Is A Pishach?

India has an expansive rubric of folklore, local tales, and folk entities that are yet unexplored and severely underrepresented in horror. With the right usage, the elements can grow larger than themselves and also leave room for modern concepts of horror and sci-fi to be incorporated in the narrative. While examples are rare, Baida feels like a bold attempt to at least delve into the genre, even though all the scientific rationale does not quite hold up along with its North Indian folk practices. The film tries to play with concepts and folk rituals, as well as the colonial period, to prove a point, which almost hits home. In this article, let’s take a closer look at how Baida unravels.

Spoilers Ahead

Baida begins with a scene from British India, where the rulers are chasing two men to hang them. This was a common punishment of the era, and the men ran for their lives. Cut to the present, we meet Ram Babu—a former hitman turned salesman, who left his life of gore and violence to seek a peaceful life in rural Uttar Pradesh. Ram Babu hitches a ride with locals and asks them to drop him at Pankhatta village. The men seem to know a secret that they do not reveal, but they try to warn Ram Babu and ask him to stay at the nearby village for the night. When he refuses, he is dropped in the middle of the night in farmland– two predictable foreshadows that we have encountered in most horrors. Ram Babu walks to find a bonfire where a mysterious man is playing the sarangi. When he tries to walk in the shown direction, eerie hallucinations take over him. He has no choice but to accept the man’s offer to stay in his cottage. 

The cottage, which is actually the portal that this man uses to time travel, shifts him to a parallel dimension where every day happens on a repeat due to electromagnetic tampering. While Ram Babu is about to be hanged, he snaps back to reality on a field. He walks to the nearby village and meets Golu, who takes him to a spiritual healer called Ahilma, who explains what happened to him. The man he met is Pishaach—a man from the 1940s who used black magic to create a portal to defeat the Britishers. However, soon he lost his sense of right and wrong, and now he captures innocent prey and hangs them in his timeline. Ram Babu could only come back because he touched him, but it left an impression on his arm—enough to make an image of him in the other timeline and hang him there. He has only 48 hours to undo this; otherwise, he is going to lose his life. 

Ram Babu finds the other survivor, Himan, and speaks to one Dr. Sakhawat to understand how to defeat the Pishach in his own timeline. Largely, the plot would consist of driving a ball of energy at the Pishach and destroying the chair that he uses as a portal. With the help of Golu, Ram Babu enters the dimension again and confronts the Pishach. All the while, Ahilma sits on a Virat Yoga to empower Ram Babu, and he magically escapes the dimension, lifting the death sentence off of him. However, the film ends on an ambiguous note, with the Pishach not completely going away—as he has survived in the 1940s. Dr. Shakhawat realizes that his experiment may have failed and tells Ram Babu that the Pishach lives on. 

Baida is possibly a derivation from the word “Baidya”– which means a local witch doctor with knowledge of local folklore, herbs, and rituals. In this case, if Pishach is the malevolent entity, then Baida is the triangle of Ram Babu, Ahilma, and Dr. Sakhawat. While Ahilma has the historical context about Pishach and how he operates, Ram Babu is the one doing the actions, and the doctor brings in the scientific explanation to it. It is quite balanced how the three collaborate to save Ram Babu’s life, even if it does not kill the Pishach in the end. The film is bold in stating that evil cannot be defeated at once because of its cyclical nature and how deep it hides into the folds of history. Perhaps, the 1940s needed an entity like the Pishach who would hold up the indigenous value in front of the invaders, but the Pishach was simply a cocktail of black magic and pseudo-science gone wrong with a lack of moral concerns. His evil is cyclical, but at least it was contained within the 1940s timeline. 

In Indian folktales, the Pishach points to an umbrella of demonic entities with local interpretations. While there is one form, which is the flesh-eating entities, there are also reinterpretations of the Pishach as a highly intelligent man who lives among people. They retain their scholarly mind and are adept at maya (the art of illusion) and ritual glamour. They are highly spiritual with an affinity towards music, art, and finer things. 

In this film, the Pishach checks all the boxes—when Ram Babu meets him, he is playing a Sarengi, and he is finely dressed in white clothes; the first sign of him being a pishach is when his feet start to warp strangely. Odd feet are a sign to look out for in witches and malevolent entities, and soon after he evolves into one who not only possesses spiritual knowledge but has also created a strange portal. We see this portal once in the film when Himan is narrating his story. He jumped in the well after chewing some copper. Strangely, the well does not appear anymore in the film, and the chair becomes the main mode of travel between dimensions. The other dimension also has strange-looking totems, which are never explained explicitly except that they control the electromagnetic frequencies of the dimension, making one day go in loops much like “The Endless,” where a cult lives till they die and repeat the cycle once again endlessly. 

While the film set out with a promising premise, much of it becomes diluted by the end due to a lack of explanation of its lore. Dr. Sakhawat has one entity caged whose history we fail to learn; he also listens to some 600-year-old audio clips, which seem oddly placed in the narrative and are left without continuation. Destroying the electromagnetic force field seems almost like jargon, or maybe like blowing out earth lamps, as is literally shown in the film, which looks underwhelming. Ahilma just starts channeling powers through yoga; if she could do this, then why did she not try it before? 

The only saving grace is that the Pishach lives on despite all the efforts. I agree that if the low-stakes, haphazardly put-together efforts did end up killing the man (who set up all that elaborate electromagnetic stuff on his own) it would be a little disappointing. Also, the film seems to propagate the idea that folk rituals should overtake scientific endeavors and paint them as evil. Why are “Pishach” and “electromagnetism” being uttered in the same breath over and over, and why is yoga being glorified? We could have surely done a better job of not doing this black-and-white portrayal of folk vs. science when the film could have made space for both to exist. 

While Baida deserves credit for even attempting to break away from the overused haunted-house template of Indian horror cinema by tapping into underutilized folklore, the plot could have surely been made tighter. Baida ends like a strange hybrid of folk horror, part low-tech science fiction, and part period thriller without fully committing to anything or being able to synthesize it in a satisfactory blend.