Parzaan Dastur’s voice has broken somewhere between the snowfields of Parzania and the dusty soccer pitches of Sikandar, which makes his first scenes as an adolescent carrying a grudge feel slightly off-kilter until you realize the character is supposed to sound like a boy who has grown up too fast in a valley that forgets its children. If I'm honest, the sound mixing in the opening ten minutes makes everyone sound like they are shouting from inside a galvanized bucket, which immediately pulls you out of whatever grim mood the director was trying to set with those lingering drone shots over the river. It’s a small thing but it bugged me every time the audio level dipped during a whispered conversation between cousins who should be whispering because there are soldiers outside the window.

Piyush Jha directs with a certain blunt-force trauma that feels very far away from the usual glossy finish you get in mainstream Bollywood releases where every single cobblestone looks like it was washed with mineral water before the cameras rolled. He points the lens at things and just leaves it there, letting actors sweat and stutter while the light dies behind them without any artificial golden hour assistance from a bank of expensive diffusers. The screenplay has this habit of dropping important plot points into casual table talk and then refusing to explain them for forty minutes, leaving you to piece together who sold out whom during the curfew based entirely on a sideways glance across a plate of cold mutton. It is not always an effective strategy, especially when half the dialogue is swallowed by the rattling of an old diesel heater that clearly needed to be replaced before shooting started.

Parzaan Dastur carries the weight of the film on shoulders that still look a bit too narrow for an oversized fleece jacket, playing Sikandar not as a born freedom fighter or a tragic martyr, but as an angry kid who has had his bicycle stolen too many times by people with better uniforms. He has this dead-eyed stare that works wonders when he is forced to listen to local politicians make promises they have already broken twice this week, though he occasionally loses his footing in scenes that require him to cry on cue. Opposite him, Ayesha Kapoor brings a quiet, watchful intensity that reminds you of her work in Black, though here she is given much less room to breathe because the camera is always crowding her face with extreme close-ups that show every pore and stray hair.

R. Madhavan turns up about an hour in as a cynical bureaucrat who treats counter-insurgency like an accounting error, and he steals every single scene he is in simply by refusing to raise his voice while everyone else is screaming their lungs out. He has this trick of chewing on a toothpick while a grenade goes off down the street that tells you everything you need to know about his character’s relationship to the local population. Sanjay Suri and Arunoday Singh show up as varying shades of moral compromise, with Singh chewing scenery with the kind of physical bulk that makes you wonder how he manages to squeeze into those tight fatigues without tearing the seams every time he reaches for his holster.

The cinematography relies heavily on a desaturated palette that makes Kashmir look less like a postcard and more like a crime scene where someone forgot to wash the floors. It is effective for about an hour before you start wishing for a single primary color that isn't khaki or slate gray. The background score by Shamir Tandon leans too hard on a recurring flute motif that plays every time a character looks out a window at the mountains, which happens at least three times a reel, creating a predictability that drains the tension right out of the frame.

Hindi films have a long and complicated history with political violence, often treating the valley either as a romantic backdrop for doomed lovers or as a pure battleground for hyper-masculine heroes who solve complex geopolitical issues with a well-timed roundhouse kick. Sikandar tries to split the difference by focusing on the kids who have to walk past checkpoints just to get to school, but it keeps getting distracted by its own desire to be a thriller with car chases and secret rendezvous in abandoned brick kilns. Those action sequences feel pasted on from an entirely different movie, one starring actors who aren't trying to make a statement about the cost of growing up under a curfew.

When the film focuses on the small indignities of daily life—the sudden snap of a telephone wire, the way shopkeepers pull their shutters down three hours early just because a jeep went by—it achieves a strange, bruised kind of honesty that stays with you long after the credits roll on a black screen with no music. It stumbles whenever it tries to lecture the audience about peace and brotherhood using dialogue that sounds like it was lifted straight from an editorial in a morning newspaper. Hindi movies of this scale usually want to heal the world by the time the house lights come up, but Sikandar is messy enough to leave a few stitches loose, and that rough edge is perhaps its best feature.