Alia Bhatt’s Alpha goes rogue to pander to a post-Dhurandhar landscape

That is why, their recent theatrical outing, Alpha, directed by Shiv Rawail, starring Alia Bhatt and Sharvari, is such a dispiriting watch. It appears to abandon that tradition in favour of a more fashionable grammar. It appears to embrace the language of the age, where suspicion replaces compassion, and nationalism hardens into antagonism. But before it gives itself away, Alpha allows, if only sporadically, a glimpse of the film it could have been; the film it perhaps ought to have been. It opens in the shadow of the Kargil War. Rows upon rows of coffins, each wrapped in the Indian tricolour, recede into the horizon. Standing before them are two soldiers: Fateh Singh (Bobby Deol) and Vikrant Kaul (Anil Kapoor). They are not simply two men but two ideas of India, two ways of loving a country. Kaul looks upon the dead and sees the unbearable cost of war. Fateh looks at the same coffins and thinks only of those yet to be killed. For one, patriotism begins with grief; for the other, it ends in vengeance.

The moment cannot help but summon Main Hoon Na, another film about two patriots standing on opposite sides of the same conviction. But that film belonged to an older India. It was a time when humanism was not dismissed as naivety. It was the Kauls of that world who had the final word. Alpha belongs to a new age. In an era where servility masquerades as strength and aggression passes for conviction, it is Fateh who inherits the narrative. But, for those opening minutes, hope takes root. You begin to believe that perhaps a mainstream Hindi spy actioner might finally look beyond the exhausted theatre of cross-border antagonism and ask harder questions, like say, about the borders we have drawn within ourselves. It was a small hope. And in 2026, hope is always the first casualty. In mainstream Hindi cinema today, it often comes at a cost. In Alpha, that cost is watching a film relinquishing its conscience.

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Alia Bhatt and Sharvari-starrer Alpha is the first female-led spy thriller in the YRF Spy Universe.

Last year, as part of its Spy Universe, Yash Raj Films released War 2, an exhaustingly shallow spectacle. It was shoddy filmmaking, sort of assembled more than authored. And yet, I would return to it over Alpha any day. On paper, both films suffer from the same ailments: an overburdened screenplay, hyperactive editing that wants to outpace an audience whose attention the film no longer trusts. Even Alpha’s much-publicised distinction as the franchise’s first female-led spy film is undermined by a gaze that remains stubbornly masculine and an understanding of “girl power” that never moves beyond the perfunctory. But Alpha commits a far greater betrayal. It turns its back on the very politics that gave this universe its moral centre. When Aditya Chopra and Kabir Khan began this journey with Ek Tha Tiger, the films imagined a world where patriotism did not require hatred, where India and Pakistan could stand together against terrorism and fanaticism rather than become permanent enemies in each other’s stories. Across the Tiger films and even Pathaan, the border was never the final enemy; prejudice was.

Alpha discards such a sentiment. Its second half hinges on a major twist so anxious to flatter the political mood of the moment that the film almost loses sight of itself. It is less a narrative decision than an act of subservience, as though the film suddenly grows afraid of its own convictions and begins chasing the applause reserved for more uncomplicated, more bigoted spectacles like Dhurandhar. In its attempt to pander, it reeks of insecurity and a desperation to belong. The tragedy is that another film keeps surfacing beneath the one we get. There are flashes of a more wounded story: of a young woman whose world has been stolen from her, who inherits a life she never chose, who must slowly discover herself beneath the burdens imposed upon her.  Nearly a decade ago, Alia Bhatt came to define the reluctant spy with Raazi, playing a young woman drawn into the world of espionage because her family left her with no other choice. Ideally, Alpha should have completed that circle. Instead, it breaks it. The journey folds back on itself only to reveal how profoundly the cinema around her has changed. Once, compassion was the bravest thing a Hindi film could believe in. Today, it is the first thing it is willing to surrender.