Summary of this article
Directed by Travis Hodgkins, the film follows a teenage boy in 1990s Kashmir, forced to count the dead in a valley that once symbolised beauty.
As friends cross borders and violence closes in, he is caught between survival and conscience.
An adaptation of Mirza Waheed’s The Collaborator (2011), this is a haunting, human story that resists easy labels of victim and perpetrator.
In the opening scene, a young boy (Nikhil Singh Rai) stands visibly uneasy, grappling with a darkness he cannot yet name. What makes the moment striking is its setting: a valley full of flowers, with mountains stretching quietly in the background. The beauty is almost deceptive, because surrounding him are the bodies of Kashmiri men killed by the Indian Army. The contrast is immediate and unsettling, as the film announces its world through irony.
The protagonist, referred to only as “the boy,” remains unnamed throughout the film, directed by Travis Hodgkins, just as he does in renowned Kashmiri author Mirza Waheed’s acclaimed debut novel The Collaborator. He comes from a place often described as paradise, but the film deliberately avoids romanticising it. The colour palette is muted, the tones slightly dimmed—as if the landscape itself carries the weight of what has unfolded there.
Before the conflict fully consumes his life, the boy exists within a close-knit group of four friends. They grow up together, go to school together and move through the rhythms of an ordinary adolescence. The film allows brief moments of tenderness to break through, particularly in his quiet, budding relationship with a girl from school, who is also his friend’s sister. Their intimacy is understated: exchanged notes that simply read “butterflies,” secret meetings in distant fields, hands brushing, eyes lingering. In one such moment, he turns to poetry to say what he otherwise cannot, reciting Kahlil Gibran:
“Who dares unite the roar of the sea
And the singing of the nightingale?
Who dares compare the shrieking tempest to the sigh of an infant?
Who dares speak aloud the words Intended for the heart to speak?
What human dares sing in voice
The song of God?”
But these moments are fleeting. As the story progresses, the violence closes in. The boy is left behind, not untouched, but trapped in a different way. Set in the 1990s along the Line of Control, the film follows the boy as he is coerced by an Indian Army captain into entering a valley of corpses to retrieve identification cards from the dead. His father agrees to this arrangement in order to keep him alive. The task is both physical and psychological, as each body he encounters could belong to someone he once knew—one of the many boys who disappeared from his village.
What the film captures with precision is the boy’s internal conflict. He does not want to be complicit, does not want to be associated with the Army, does not want to stand among the dead cataloguing loss. At the same time, he cannot follow his friends across the border, nor can he bring them back. This in-betweenness becomes his burden.
Nikhil Singh Rai delivers a performance that carries this tension with remarkable restraint. His portrayal avoids dramatics; instead, it is in the silences, the hesitations and the quiet breakdowns that the character takes shape.
The film, much like the novel, pushes back against the simplified narratives often presented in mainstream discourse around “terrorism.” It reframes the story through human experience: a boy caught in conflict, parents trying to protect their child, friends who turn to militancy believing it to be a form of resistance and a soldier who is neither entirely monstrous nor absolved.
It is a deeply affecting film that gets much of it right—its emotional core, performances and the refusal to flatten its characters into binaries. The only note of hesitation comes from the familiar visual stereotypes in the way Kashmiri characters are dressed and presented at times, an old cinematic habit that feels out of place in an otherwise nuanced narrative.
Captain Kadian, the Army officer, played by Rudi Dharmalingam, is written with unsettling complexity. In one scene, he drinks while sitting with the boy and shows him photographs from his past, his days as a literature student, his wife, his daughters. “I don’t want to be here,” he admits. “I want to go home.” The line does not redeem him, but it complicates him. The film resists easy moral binaries.
Importantly, the narrative does not dwell on geopolitical explanations or the broader India-Pakistan conflict. Instead, it remains tightly focused on the human cost—families losing sons, villages hollowed out and a generation growing up in the shadow of violence.
By the end, the boy is no longer just a witness, but someone profoundly altered. In one of the most haunting scenes that makes the viewer gasp for breath, he lies among the dead, speaking softly to a lifeless body, as if trying to restore dignity to what has been reduced to numbers. He says: “Between your feet lie seventeen flowers, did you know that these valleys bloom like this? You chose the right place to be laid to rest, among your friends, in these flower-filled valleys. And yet, in these very valleys, only the shadows of young boys seem to wander.”
When he is finally given the opportunity to take revenge, the film resists closure. What it offers instead, is neither justice nor resolution, but an act of reclaiming humanity.
