Director Jagadeesan Subu's Bakrid is what we call a 'could have been' film. The film displayed some earnestness at the beginning, where we see a struggling farmer Rathnam (played by Vikranth) negotiating with a bank official for a loan sanction. The scene carries some amount of authenticity to it, but as the film progresses, we see that the film loses focus towards the climax ends up not utilizing its potential.
Bakrid revolves around Rathnam, a debt-ridden farmer who wants to pursue farming in his share of land, that was acquired from his brother after a legal tussle. During the course of receiving a loan from his moneylender, he acquires a baby camel from and him. What happens when Rathnam is forced to let go of his pet after eleven months of companionship forms the rest of the story.
Initially, Bakrid has a lot of nice moments that could have been added up to a feel-good drama. There is a subplot about Rathnam and his estranged brother, who is lured by a land shark as a part of his scheme. The moments between Rathnam and his daughter, one of them involves a scene where Rathnam distracts her from junk food, are quite endearing. But these moments are just setups, there is no conclusion for the strands that are brought in the first half. The lack of payoffs for subplots is evident throughout the film.
The film gives lesser space to the relationship between Rathnam and his camel (named Saara). The narrative doesn't provide a convincing case for why we should care for their struggle. Despite its shortcomings, Bakrid comes up with a fairly intriguing interval block, where the truck in which Rathnam carries Saara is stopped by Gau Rakshaks, but the cliffhanger is underutilized through predictable writing.
In the second half, we are introduced to unintentionally hilarious characters. There is an American traveler who speaks broken Tamil (obviously the accent seemed forced since his lines weren't presumably dubbed by an American). There is a completely incoherent and unnecessary subplot where Saara rescues two injured BSF jawans, and that triggers a social media phenomenon. Bakrid is bogged down by less interesting moments in the second half and the overbearing presence of loose ends, that could have possibly been more intriguing than the film's premise.
The earnestness of Vikranth and Vasundhara Kashyap's performance is rarely capitalized by the narrative. Individually, Bakrid has some fine moments and instances of a feel-good drama, but these standalone moments do not conveniently add up to a bigger picture.