Torch
2023 · 14m · India
Genres: coming-of-age, drama, war
Tones: melancholic, tender, tense
During the 1999 Kargil war, two young sisters hide in their basement in a border village under attack, clinging to games, stories, and each other while they wait for their father to return.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
It's a war film that refuses the usual trauma pageantry—two kids playing games in a basement while shells fall is almost perverse in its restraint, and that refusal to perform suffering is exactly the kind of subversive move that makes consensus critics uncomfortable.
The film positions itself deliberately within the tradition of intimate war cinema—Pialat, Kiarostami—where the domestic interior becomes the real battlefield; the formal patience required to sustain a 14-minute basement vigil without melodrama speaks to considerable directorial discipline.
The entire film hinges on the decision to keep the war itself almost inaudible—muffled, distant—which forces every ounce of emotional weight onto the sisters' small gestures and the sound design of their games; it's a radical choice that turns constraint into devastating specificity.