‘Sarzameen’ Movie Review: When Family Melodrama Bickers With Patriotic Drama

In Sarzameen (“beloved land”), an Indian army officer, Colonel Vijay Menon (Prithviraj Sukumaran), is tasked with ending violence in the Valley. The Kashmir-for-Dummies setting aids him. All he must do is “liberate Kashmir from the mysterious terrorist whose code-name is Mohsin”. It’s simple. But Vijay — that Angry Young Man who wears generational rage as his uniform — has a problem. And it’s not Kaabil (K.C. Shankar), the dangerous militant he’s just captured. Vijay has a son, Harman (Ronav Parihar), who stammers. His old-school masculinity cannot accept it; he is ashamed, despite daily implorations from his wife, Meher (Kajol). Naturally, Vijay’s mission reaches a point where he must choose between his abducted son and his country. The colonel makes his choice. (Lest we don’t get it, he acts out his thoughts — always). But it is not without consequences: eight years later, a seemingly radicalised young man named Harman (Ibrahim Ali Khan) returns to his parents. Is he the new Mohsin? Does his trauma matter? Is he cute? Where is his stutter?

Given that Sarzameen is a Dharma Productions film, you can detect a collision of eras and sensibilities: vintage “It’s all about loving your family” v/s new-age “It’s all about loving your nation”. It’s one filmmaking tenor — those lyrical songs of melancholy and longing — gatecrashing another: that tense Raazi-coded contest between patriotism and individualism. It’s a strange experiment, like parachuting the 2000s Karan Johar universe into the geo-cultural minefield of 2025. The family is a breath away from singing together, yet there’s a decades-long conflict waiting to be resolved. The meta-casting of Ibrahim Ali Khan as a distressed young man with a stutter — Khan opened up about a speech impediment after the release of Nadaaniyan — adds to the fusion of motifs. The result is less of an emotional thriller and more of a ‘political melodrama’: a stagey and artificial-looking genre that does justice to neither tone.

The background score insists on being the hero, villain and anti-hero. The songs become a crutch to portray complicated feelings and transformations; they conceal the acting — and the lack of it. The simplistic commentary (the toll of ‘proving’ one’s patriotism) becomes a footnote. The action set-pieces look like romantic music videos gone wrong. The extremists look like they’re cosplaying in a Tere Bin Laden-style satire, as does the production design. The others resemble models sporting a ‘Fall-Winter Border Rustic’ catalogue. The dialogue (“a mother has no borders”) diffuses the aggressions of modern-day jingoism with old-fashioned secularism — a cocktail concocted in Kesari Chapter 2. The plot twist (the goofy casting gives it all away) feels like a last-ditch attempt to rescue the mixtape of disparate genres. There are twists that shock you because you don’t see them coming; this one is so outrageous that you’d be worried if you saw it coming.

Sarzameen is the second Hindi film this month after Anupam Kher’s Tanvi the Great where the devotion to country emerges as a troubled protagonist. It works better here, supplied by a father-son relationship as the core of a story that puts forth a sensible thought: Country first doesn’t mean family (or love) last. The shaky performances aside, Sarzameen is so focused on mining the familial suspense that the rest of the elements — especially its reverence for the army, and its commitment to not offending so much as a fly on the wall — look like hollow cosmetics. It has very little idea of the place, too; it says something that a Kashmir movie could’ve unfolded anywhere else in the world without any changes.

Evidence of this lies in the silliness of a training montage — Harman spends eight years ‘manning up’ in a terrorist camp — where the bosses blare a cell-phone recording of Harman’s dad (“I choose India over my son”) near his ear to spur him on and build muscles. Not to mention the age-old gimmick of technology failing (fax machine for the win) when time-sensitive information needs to be relayed. For the record, a printout of a militant’s not-so-secret texts to his handlers include “I plan to kill Vijay Menon today”; if he spelled it out any more, it’d be the shared location of an Uber ride. There’s also the awkward moment where a 20-something Harman, torn between betrayal and loyalty, sits with the childhood version of himself at a stream. In a better film, this wouldn’t appear like he’s asking a weird kid for advice.

It should be mentioned that one doesn’t notice these ‘creative licenses’ and loopholes if mainstream cinema is done well. That’s the primary purpose of masala storytelling — engaging viewers broadly enough to place suspension of

disbelief over all else. But Sarzameen pits logic against emotions instead of employing one as a ruse for the other. Even as a coming-of-age story for the son — a bullied man in search of a hybrid masculinity across sides — there is no conviction. A post-credits flashback insists on explaining what is already obvious; the protagonist was someone else all along, and that’s the parallel movie we (and Vijay Menon, an allegedly competent soldier) missed. In short, this film’s identity crisis makes it difficult to process; it took me three sittings to complete the 135-minute watch. A ticking time-bomb with an “input password” key — where dying people must take a wild guess based on memories and sentiment — does not make life easier. It’s one thing being commercial and accessible, it’s another to lose connection with reality.