Review: Line of Control (2026)

Travis Hodgkins’s Line of Control, adapted from Mirza Waheed’s 2011 novel The Collaborator, locates the human cost of the Kashmir conflict in a predicament that makes innocence difficult to preserve. 

Set in 1993, as insurgency and military repression tighten their hold on the valley, the film follows a teenage boy (Nikhil Singh Rai) whose closest friends have disappeared, presumed to have crossed the Line of Control into Pakistan. Their absence leaves him suspended between hope and dread, unable to determine whether they are alive or whether he will encounter their bodies among the dead.

The Boy’s predicament becomes more harrowing when Captain Kadian (Rudi Dharmalingam), an Indian Army officer, compels him to retrieve weapons and identification cards from the corpses scattered across a valley. Each expedition brings the possibility of recognition. The task is not merely an ordeal of physical endurance. It forces the boy to confront the possibility that his friends have become casualties of a conflict whose logic he can neither comprehend nor escape. Back in his village, his enforced proximity to the military makes him suspect to his neighbours. Survival acquires the appearance of complicity.

Hodgkins understands that the tragedy of occupation and insurgency often resides in the narrowing of choices available to ordinary people. The boy is neither a conventional hero nor a political emblem. He is a young man trying to recover the truth about his friends while negotiating competing demands on his loyalty. The film’s most disturbing question is not whether he will make the right decision, but whether such a decision remains possible when every available course carries its own moral cost. Allegiance becomes less a matter of conviction than a condition imposed by circumstance.

Johan Holmqvist’s cinematography gives the landscape an oppressive materiality. The valley’s expanses, scarred by violence, offer little consolation in their beauty. The imagery links the devastation of the landscape to the emotional distress of those who live there, without turning their suffering into spectacle. Jamie Kirkpatrick’s editing sustains the tension between the film’s measured passages and its more urgent sequences. Suspense arises not simply from uncertainty about what will happen next, but from the dread of what the protagonist might discover.

The performances keep the film’s moral questions grounded in human experience. Dharmalingam gives Captain Kadian an unsettling authorisation, making the officer’s demands frightening precisely because they emerge from an established hierarchy of power. Rai, meanwhile, conveys the boy’s vulnerability without reducing him to a passive victim. His predicament registers through the strain of having to endure what he cannot openly resist.

Line of Control stays close to the boy’s personal ordeal rather than attempting to explain the wider conflict in Kashmir. As he searches for his missing friends, he becomes increasingly alienated from the people he has known all his life. Hodgkins shows how the need to survive can turn into a source of suspicion, leaving the boy caught between the demands of the larger forces and the expectations of his community. The border shapes not only the geography of the region but also the relationships of those who live there, forcing the boy to confront the cost of survival and the difficulty of holding on to his conscience.