Siege
2019 · 15m · India
Directed by Deeptanshu Sinha
Genres: drama, sci-fi, thriller
Tones: contemplative, dark, tense
After a citywide lockdown is declared to make the city crime-free, Aaditya, a soldier from the city forces, must protect citizens from the commander and his troops; cornered, he attempts suicide and lands in a coma, where he must choose between staying under to avoid more bloodshed or returning to keep his promise.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Sinha weaponizes the coma as a Trojan horse—what looks like a sci-fi thriller about state violence actually caves inward into existential paralysis, forcing the protagonist (and us) to ask whether staying dead is the most honest form of resistance. It's the kind of formally audacious move that makes you retroactively unsure what genre you just watched.
The coma-state device deliberately suspends the action-thriller's momentum in favor of philosophical inquiry, positioning *Siege* within a lineage of political cinema that privileges interior moral reckoning over spectacle—a formally rigorous choice that transforms what could have been genre exercise into contemplative study.
The pivot from lockdown-thriller syntax to coma-logic is held entirely on the decision to make the soldier's paralysis—both physical and moral—the actual visual and narrative center, a single structural gambit that dismantles conventional heroism and makes everything that precedes it feel like a prologue to the real film.
Reviews
Layered complexity of the plot, jaw dropping visuals, dialogues, acting, music and the superb sequences executed with some slick visual effects.
The director is no less than a genius — a man in search for peace only to realise that it cannot be found.
Festivals
- Student Academy Awards 2019
- The Monthly Film Festival 2020, Audience Award & Editor of the Month (February)
- Adrian International Film Festival 2019