The Blood and Gore in ‘The Kashmir Files’ Seems Gratuitous Because It Depicts Reality
- The director deliberately makes the audience squirm at the details. He slows down the action. Slow enough to give us an impactful hit of each moment of the horror.
Stepping out of the movie theatre in New Brunswick, New Jersey after watching “The Kashmir Files,” I asked the opinion of the first person I could find – a teenager of Indian origin. “Mindless glorification of violence,” he said. Not surprising to hear that from someone growing up in the U.S. For us raised in India watching Indian movies, violence on the screen is as normal as the random songs and dances. We stand and applaud when our hero breaks down walls and beats to a pulp an army of goons. We adore those scenes when bombs are exploded, heads are chopped, and bones are crushed. We love the action, fire, blood and gore because we know that nothing is real. We celebrate them as much as we celebrate our extravagant hip-thrust sequences and superhuman feats fully aware that they are figments of someone’s imagination and don’t happen in real life.
“The Kashmir Files” is a very different Indian film in that sense. The violence on screen is bothersome because it is based on what we know truly happened. There is somebody real behind those characters. A victim, a perpetrator, an abettor, a politician, an official, and many witnesses who often watched helplessly. We identify with a random someone, empathizing with the pain, feeling triggered and helpless too. Unlike the teenager growing up in a New Jersey suburb, many of us who were in India and old enough to remember those days know that the stories we vaguely heard about and were too afraid to dig deep are indeed hard to watch when presented in detail. We read the headlines, we had uncles and aunts interested in the topic discuss them at home. The news about Hindus of Kashmir being driven out of their homes did reach us in our safe living rooms all over the country but we didn’t get to hear the details. The details are where the film shines.
Director Vivek Agnihotri has tried his best to make the audience squirm at the details. He slows down the action. Slow enough to give us an impactful hit of each moment of the horror. When shots ring out of Bitta’s gun and the bullets pierce the foreheads of men, women and children lined up to die, we hear and feel the full reverberation of each bang. As bullet after bullet drills in, distorts the contours of each face, and bodies drop in a bloody heap; even the most desensitized film watcher of gratuitous violence will feel a chill run down the spine.
The film as a literary work is comparable to Hunter Thomson’s angry prose with a generous dose of the sordid and tragic. It grabs you by the scruff of your neck, forces you down to your seat and slaps you to watch.
I was there when Agnihotri announced the movie in New Jersey at an event in 2019. At the event, where the name of the film was not divulged yet, he had spoken at length about the untold stories of Kashmir and how it needs to be told. The movie lives up to those expectations he had created at that meeting including a very deliberate apolitical posture that probably irritates his detractors. If one were to try to poke holes in the film, the conspicuous absence of any direct political posturing should be an easy pick.
The film as a literary work is comparable to Hunter Thomson’s angry prose with a generous dose of the sordid and tragic. It grabs you by the scruff of your neck, forces you down to your seat and slaps you to watch; with no choice but soak-in, all the vitriol splattered on the screen. If not by the words, by the power of its visuals – mostly dark, grey and cold except for the intermittent bursts of conflagration and cries of pain. This definitely is not a film meant to be gentle. Honestly, I expected harder scenes. Agnihotri has played it down at many places I thought could have blown the lid off. Yet, something as telling has rarely been told in such forceful magnitude.
The original musical score by Rohit Sharma brilliantly complements the pace and intensity in every scene. Some of the weighty scenes play out in deafening silence adding to the mood of doom and gloom in the theatre. Even when unleashed in full, the score is very restrained and never overwhelms.
The acting is also surprisingly restrained for the film and its context. Anupam Kher has delivered yet another masterpiece. He is easily one of the best actors living among us today regardless of language and region. Pallavi Joshi, Mithun Chakraborty, Puneet Issar, Atul Srivastava and Prakash Belawadi are convincingly brilliant and carry their characters with gusto. Darshan Kumar as Krishna Pandit is a stand-out. I would be surprised if he doesn’t land some plum roles in the near future. Though Chinmay Mandlekar has done a great job as the villain Farook Malik Bitta, I thought the real Bitta, whose videos are all over the internet, is far more menacing.
I do see why some people would think that “The Kashmir Files” is propaganda. By the same measure, Spielberg’s “Schindler’s List” could be called anti-Nazi propaganda.
For everybody else, this is freedom of speech and expression at its fiercest. It is a regrettable story from our history that had to be told.
Born and raised in Bengaluru and living in New Jersey, Anand Rao is a writer, director and communications consultant who also tells stories through theatre and film. He is the author of the highly acclaimed and award-nominated play, “A Muslim in the Midst.” He attributes his creative bent of mind to an upbringing replete with stories of Indian epics, classical literature, and drama.