‘Ikkis’ Movie Review: Sriram Raghavan Hits the Sweet Spot Between Love and War

There's a wistfulness about Ikkis, a period action drama based on the life of India's youngest Param Vir Chakra awardee, Second Lieutenant Arun Khetarpal. The 21-year-old Indian army officer was immortalised during the 1971 Indo-Pakistan war; the film outlines his undying sense of duty. But the wistfulness is something we’ve come to associate with brave love stories. I last felt it after Merry Christmas, Sriram Raghavan’s soft-hearted romantic thriller rooted in war-coded emotions like sacrifice, guilt, rage, deceit, redemption, heroism and loyalty. Raghavan’s Ikkis (“21”) is a war movie rooted in love-coded emotions: longing, regret, naivety, mutual respect, trust, compassion and hope. Beneath all the bullets and armour, it’s a tender and kind film — one that reclaims patriotism as the quest for humanity, not identity or faith. I went in expecting a reverential biopic, but came out thinking of Yash Chopra and other vintage legacies of cross-border nostalgia. It’s a story in which soldiers aren’t killed; humans die. It’s a post-partition tragedy in which two nations are united by memory and divided by borders. In other words, Ikkis is a minor miracle in a genre landscape that often sells valour in the currency of hate and victimhood. It’s hard not to feel protective of it.

The structure of Ikkis is the clincher. Two timelines are juxtaposed with each other. In the years leading up to 1971, we see the more conventional narrative: the rise of a young Arun (Agastya Nanda) from his Pune cadet days, to his integration as a spirited tank commander in the 17 Poona Horse regiment during the Battle of Basantar. This is the film that modern audiences are wired to watch. It has all the standard beats. Arun is a righteous student leader who inspires his team to victory in the NDA; he falls for a girl; he thirsts for the binaries of war so that he can prove himself and walk in the footsteps of his forefathers; he is fast-tracked into the army, goes through those training montages and impresses his superiors; he then shines during a bloody and action-packed climax.

But it’s the second timeline that unfolds with the misty-eyed lyricism of a short story. It’s 2001, the wounds of Kargil are still fresh, and Brigadier M.L. Khetarpal (Dharmendra) — the frail 81-year-old father of posthumous PVC awardee Arun — visits Lahore for a college reunion. The reunion is also the perfect excuse to see his ancestral home in Sargodha, and the locations where his son became a fabled story. He is hosted by Brigadier Mohammed Naser (Jaideep Ahlawat), a retired Pakistani officer who is unusually keen to show him around. Naser speaks highly of Arun and his exploits on that fateful December day of 1971; Khetarpal is disarmed by his chivalry and hospitality. What the old man doesn’t know, however, is that Naser was the ‘enemy’ — the rival tank commander — who felled Arun 30 years ago. This conceit is mostly clear from the beginning; Naser’s wife and daughter urge him to confess during Khetarpal’s 3-day trip. It isn’t played as some grand twist, much in line with the film’s own conscience. It also doesn’t matter if 1971 or 2001 is the primary narrative — whether it’s one timeline flashing back, or another flashing forward — because the India we see in both portions feels like history in 2025.

What this structure does is allow Ikkis to simultaneously unfold as a crafty war drama and a poignant anti-war movie. It’s like watching a definitive event — one we’ve watched, learned and read about for decades — and its cultural audit running parallel to each other. The film manages to laud and lament at once; the indictment of a conflict that deepens borders is disguised as the heartfelt celebration of a war-hero. We are conditioned to come for the bullets, but it asks us to stay for the stillness. Every little landmark in Arun’s journey co-exists with the melancholy of his father’s pre-partition memories. Brigadier Khetarpal’s pride of having a son frozen in time morphs into the grief of being a countryman displaced by the irony of time. While touring the bylanes of his past and meeting people like him, he can’t help but wonder who the enemy was, where the futures went, or if the tree in his childhood backyard knows that it is now in a different country.

The old-school simplicity of the message works because of the late Dharmendra. The performance is almost incidental; his presence itself injects the film with a sentimentality that cannot be faked. It's a full-fledged role. The reminiscence of the character intersects with the remembrance of the actor at several points. I can’t think of a better swansong for a Bollywood superstar, in an age where secularism often emerges as a political reaction rather than a national value. There’s a lived-in heft to Brigadier Khetarpal's words and vacant expressions. Whether he’s chatting or wandering, he always seems to be on the brink of breaking the fourth wall and asking the viewer to look within. Similarly, the casting of Agastya Nanda reframes his limitations as strengths; it lends itself to the raw and unfiltered zest of a young officer who has inherited his ideals from pop culture and family tradition. Arun aches to be the protagonist of his own story — the boyish patriot torn between duty and loyalty until he melds them together — and Nanda’s sincerity supplies the arc. The character is consumed by a desire to make a difference at any cost. It is very much his reality and his truth; at no point does it feel like he’s a memory in a film that’s mourning the death of innocence.

Arun’s narrative may have all the army-story tropes, but the little details keep infiltrating our notions of historical war dramas. For instance, the youthful soldier has built Pakistan up as a concept in his head so much that he’s surprised when the soil doesn’t change colour, pattern or morality once his tank barrels past the border; he is disarmed by how similar it all looks. There’s another moment of uniformity, where the locals mistake India’s tanks for their own and cheer on the troops, flinging fruits to them as a mark of honour; Arun and his squad are amused, but gratefully accept. The tank-combat sequences are skillfully filmed and cut with a dryness that refrains from taking sides. It’s hard to tell who’s winning from who’s losing, but it’s easier to determine the pain of soldiers losing friends and comrades in the thick of battle. The action doesn’t fetishise the violence. If anything, it retains an anonymity that makes it look like most wars are fought between two fearless sets of strangers following orders on barren lands; the civilians can only look on. There are territories and global stakes, but Ikkis is concerned with those in the line of fire, the unwritten rules that bind them, and most of all, the stories they’re trained to tell themselves.

Even Arun’s time as a cadet is replete with hints of these stories. It’s as if he’s trying to preserve his martial hunger in the face of ‘external’ influence. He reads Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom The Bell Tolls for his girlfriend, fuels his tank obsession with The Bridge at Remagen movie dates, and questions his relationship when it starts to affect his discipline (a reverse-Lakshya of sorts). There’s a neat touch where the gang goes to watch Billy Wilder’s Irma la Douce (1963) — a romcom about a cop whose life changes for being too honest — before Arun himself plays spoilsport and reports his squad for breaking the academy’s no-booze rules. When he finally does go to war, he’s already sacrificed so much in pursuit of mythical glory that go-for-broke heroism is the only option. He simply cannot settle for less.

Ikkis is also where Sriram Raghavan’s cinephilia comes full circle. The director’s affection for retro classics and pulpy noir has been a handy aesthetic for many of his crime thrillers; the homages and winks are almost always in service of the twisty plots. This aesthetic culminates into a beating-heart being here — the fondness for movies from bygone eras reveals itself as a fondness for a bygone democracy. It’s perfectly encapsulated by a heaven-coded moment featuring Dharmendra sharing space with the late Asrani; the old Indian man has to play along when he realises that the mind of his Alzheimer’s-afflicted Pakistani counterpart is still stuck in the throes of Partition. It’s tough to distinguish between a memory playing tricks and history pulling a fast one. And it’s impossible to not tear up at the loaded grief of their exchange. Real bleeds into reel, as two departed souls strive to remember the world they lived in. Raghavan’s touch extends to how the film reduces the cinema of espionage — in this case, two ISI agents tailing Naser and Brigadier Khetarpal around Pakistan — to a Tintin gag of sorts. Naser senses their distrust but can only scoff at their patterns; it’s almost like Ikkis ends where most communally tense and chest-beating spy thrillers begin.

Jaideep Ahlawat’s standout performance is that of a surrogate protagonist. The film affords the character the dignity of his own patriotism and flashbacks, making him a light-eyed projection of Arun — someone’s son, husband, protector and father — on the other side of the border. The character almost feels like a spiritual sibling of the dutybound RAW agent Ahlawat played in Raazi (2018), the spy version of this reflective war drama. Given his choice of roles, the Paatal Lok star’s sensibilities speak volumes in an age where it’s easier not to have any. He is perhaps the most thoughtful actor in contemporary Hindi cinema, not least because he resists the direction of the wind.

Maybe it’s fitting that one of film’s best scenes revolves around a hug. Deepak Dobriyal appears as an injured local who is enraged by the generosity offered to old Brigadier Khetarpal. He can’t believe that the enemy is being treated as a guest. Until, of course, he is enveloped in Dharmendra’s warm Punjab-sized arms. Both men have lost parts of themselves, yet they seem to complete each other. When the interval came soon after this moment, I noticed a lady hyperventilating in the seat ahead of mine. She kept throwing her arms up at anyone who cared to listen and asked: Where is the logic? How can one timeline be in 2001, the year of the Delhi Parliament attacks? How offensive is that? It didn’t matter to her that the story — especially the meeting between the two Brigadiers — is shaped by fact. She struggled to fathom the empathy coursing through the veins of a war drama; she couldn’t believe that the enemy was being treated as a guest. After the preview ended, though, she was the first to deliver a media byte to the cameras waiting outside: all praises, raving, a quivering voice even. I couldn't help but smile. The sceptic in me doubted the authenticity of her (change in) opinion. But the idealist in me believes that Ikkis subdued her with love. Maybe it persuaded her to miss the screen that Dharmendra once expanded. Perhaps she got enveloped in the film’s tank-sized arms. After all, how can you not be romantic about hugs?