War has a strange hold on the human imagination, even though it shows us at our worst. What precedes it is often a long, painful descent filled with suffering and irreparable loss, and cinema has long been drawn to capturing this descent. In India, the first documented war film was the Tamil movie 'Burma Rani' (1945), released in pre-Independence India and set against the backdrop of the Second World War, centring on the British–Japanese conflict.

Don't get me wrong, war movies are great, and some of the best movies ever made are war movies. However, over time, the war film genre has steadily drifted from introspection to spectacle, increasingly shaped by sensationalism and the expectation that every film must deliver the adrenaline rush of a Top Gun-style reboot. In chasing scale, heroism, and box-office triumph, many of these films flatten war into a binary of victory and defeat, leaving little room for nuance or moral ambiguity. Instead, these films plug neatly into a media ecosystem that thrives on outrage and instant emotional payoff. Anger, in particular, is the easiest emotion to mobilise and monetise. War cinema, in this context, becomes a tool that feeds on collective feelings of helplessness and insecurity, redirecting them into an abject and blind form of nationalism.

And amid this wave of films driven by chest-thumping spectacle and adrenaline-fuelled bravado, the gentler stories; those that dwell on the cost and quiet pain of war, often get overlooked. 'Ikkis' is one such film. Directed by Sriram Raghavan, it draws inspiration from the real-life story of Second Lieutenant Arun Khetarpal, who was killed in action at the age of just 21 (hence, the name of the movie) during the 1971 India–Pakistan War, in the Battle of Basantar. The film follows two parallel journeys: first, Arun Khetarpal’s path to the front lines of war, marked by his excitement and passion for fighting for his country; and second, his father Brigadier M. L. Khetarpal’s journey back to Lahore, played by Dharmendra, to visit his childhood home and attend a college reunion, years after his son’s passing. Both these journeys come together, as M.L. Khetripal visits the site where his son was killed.

The reason the film stood out to me was not because of its action sequences, remarkable as they were, or even the beautiful romanticisation of Pune that Sriram Raghavan often brings to his work. What stayed with me instead was the underlying story that runs alongside Arun’s unimaginable bravery: grief. At its heart, the film is about a father mourning the loss of his son for the rest of his life. Through this lens of loss, Ikkis illuminates the pain and trauma that war truly brings. We often remember those who lay down their lives for their country as heroes, but we rarely see them as human beings, with families, unfinished dreams, and, in Arun’s case, an entire life still ahead of him.

A moment in the film that struck me deeply occurs when the tank squadron crosses the India–Pakistan border into Pakistani territory. An ecstatic Arun exclaims, “Look, we’re in Pakistan,” only for someone else in his team to respond, “It looks the same.” Arun looks around and realises that it does, in fact, look the same. The exchange is brief, almost throwaway, but it quietly undercuts the idea of borders as absolute markers of difference. In that instant, the landscape refuses to perform the drama expected of it. There is no visible shift; no sudden otherness. What remains is the unsettling realisation that the land, the air, and the lives shaped by them are indistinguishable, even as young men are sent to fight and die over what are essentially arbitrary lines drawn on a map. The moment captures the film’s larger refusal to sensationalise war, choosing instead to reveal its quiet absurdity and the fragile logic that sustains it.

Jaydeep Ahlawat delivers a tender, quietly painful performance as the Pakistani officer who hosts Arun’s father in Pakistan. His presence is understated yet tinged with an unspoken sense of guilt, one that slowly reveals the depth of the long-standing connection these two men have shared across the border for years. Ahlawat shines in the smallest moments, allowing emotion to surface like, in one particularly affecting scene, he tells his daughter about the moment he learnt they were expecting while he was at war, and how his only prayer at the time was to survive long enough to see his child’s face. The film somehow gently dissolves national boundaries, reminding us that the hopes and losses of war are shared, regardless of which side of the border one stands on.

Ikkis, as Dharmendar's last film, leads with genuine heart and reminds us of the true cost of war. It is paid in lifetimes cut short, in parents who must learn to live with absence, and in generations shaped by a grief that never fully recedes. By refusing to reduce war to an aesthetic of power, Ikkis resists the urge to polarise, choosing instead to humanise. It refuses to reduce war to a matter of sides or slogans and instead asks us to sit with its consequences on near identical sides of the same border.

I am not a particularly patriotic person, but the film made me feel a sense of solidarity for Arun's bravery and for his father's grief. In doing so, Ikkis becomes a rare kind of war film: where there are no villains, only people trying to live on despite the horrific repercussions of war. 

'Ikkis', directed by Sriram Raghavan, starring Agastya Nanda, Jaydeep Ahlawat, Dharmendar, and Simar Bhatia, is playing in theatres nationwide and will be soon available for streaming on Prime Video.

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