Amaran

A true-life story of Major Mukund Varadarajan, a commissioned officer in the Indian Army`s Rajput Regiment, who was posthumously awarded the Ashok Chakra for his valor during a counterterrorism operation while on deputation to the 44th Rashtriya Rifles battalion in Jammu and Kashmir.

Release date: October 31, 2024 (India)

Director: Rajkumar Periasamy

Box office: est. ₹320 crore

Music composed by: G. V. Prakash Kumar

Producers: Kamal Haasan, R Mahendran, Mahendran

Language: Tamil

“When the guns roar, the arts die,” said celebrated playwright Arthur Miller. Many art masterpieces have been swallowed up by wars but art, like the ever-forgiving land that has caused countless battles, has withstood it all. It has been the blank canvas to paint everything from propaganda films to anti-war movies. While many of them resort to skewed agendas, director Rajkumar Periasamy takes the road less travelled with Amaran, and along with producer Kamal Haasan and powerhouse performances from Sivakarthikeyan and Sai Pallavi, the filmmaker delivers an evocative biopic of Major Mukund Varadarajan.

The perfectly titled Amaran is everything we expected it to be. While we know about the war that came in the form of an operation in which Major Mukund was killed in action, Amaran builds up to it by showcasing the battles Mukund (played by Sivakarthikeyan) and his lady love Indhu Rebecca Varghese (Sai Pallavi) had in their personal and professional lives amidst their beautiful love story.

Technically, Amaran would make for a near-perfect biographical war film but at its heart, it is an endearing love story. Partly fiction and mostly adapted from a segment of ‘India’s Most Fearless: True Stories of Modern Military Heroes’, Amaran journals the lives of Mukund and Indhu from the first time they met at college. Of course, the film follows the template of the tried and tested romance story with everything from meet-cute, convincing the families and entering into wedlock. But the army backdrop, set in the picturesque valleys of Kashmir, makes the film stand apart.

Apart from the beautiful love story, Amaran offers a glimpse into a counter-insurgency/terrorism battalion and their everyday lives. Rajkumar Periasamy isn’t new to the game of bringing to life the everyday actualities of a group of people; his fantastic debut Rangoon (2017) was about Tamil Burma repatriates and similarly, in Amaran, the filmmaker puts us right in the middle of the action and reaction of our soldiers.