Film Recommendation: On why you should watch Satluj

a film review

I have a certain relationship with banned content, whether it is a film, an internet video, or even a social media account. A ban rightfully brings attention to something, and people often feel the urge to consume what is banned purely out of solidarity. I understand that urge because I share it. I consume banned content too, and I stand up for it online, because that feels like the right thing to do. But as a standalone piece of art, banned content rarely excites me on its own. I never say this out loud, because the moment you do, the debate goes on different direction which isn’t correct thing to do in the age of censorship. So whatever gets banned activates something in me. It makes me angry, it makes me want to defend it, and yet, somewhere at the back of my mind, I also assume it probably is not great as craft, and that I am supporting it for ideological reason. That kind of viewing becomes a sympathy watch before the film has even started. This was exactly the frame of mind I carried into Satluj. But once I finished it, I was completely blown away, and the anger that followed was pointed everywhere at once. At the government, at the censorship, and finally at myself, for underestimating it.

Satluj is a stunning filmmaking achievement, the kind I have craved for years. One of the best films to come out of India (or maybe never come out of India.) In terms of sheer quality, it carries the texture of an era when Vishal Bhardwaj and Anurag Kashyap were at their peak, and watching it felt like a strange kind of nostalgia for a certain time in these ‘peak detailing’ era.

It is rare these days to see a director in such complete control of his craft. I later found out that the director, Honey Trehan, worked as Vishal Bhardwaj’s casting director (and with many others) for over two decades. That background is essential to understanding this film. Every casting choice, every face, every small role that appears for barely a minute, stays with you, and you can feel the extreme care that went into curating these faces. It makes you wonder how he pulled convincing performances out of almost the entire cast. The real genius of Honey Trehan might be this: he even managed to get a decent performance out of Arjun Rampal.

Even the cinematography here avoids the usual Punjab cinema crutches. No fog doing the easy signalling of grief, no mist or smog performing the emotional labour that the writing should be doing instead. The mood is built through staging, through small details stacked one on top of another, which is a far harder craft than simply depending on the weather.

The power of the cinematography is such that the sense of place feels accurate. One moment felt oddly personal, because something exactly similar happened to me when I visited Maholi. Early in the film, inside a police van, one policeman asks how far the destination is. The answer: bas do peg door, bana de ek lovely lovely.

The film carries so many influences, yet they all merge together with the right balance of notes. For instance: there is one scene where a police inspector, played with striking menace by Savinderpal Vicky, walks into another station suspecting the man inside of being a khabri, a police informer. They sit down to sarson ka saag, and the meal slowly turns into a killing floor. The scene borrows the same grammar of dread that Tarantino built in the milk scene in Inglourious Basterds, where Hans Landa questions a farmer about hidden Jews over a glass of milk.

Maybe the one thing I could have wished for more nuance is the character of Jaswant Singh Khalra, played pretty well by Diljit. He is written as a single note, heroic and singular dimension, but I would have liked to see some contradiction, some doubt, some exploration of the grey zones within him. More of his views on what he thinks about the politics and society of that era. A 360 degree potrait as they say. That perhaps would have pushed the film into another level of filmmaking altogether.

Even without that, Satluj is one of the best pieces of art to come out of India in a long time. Thank you, Honey Trehan. And thank you, Modi ji, for reminding millennials like us that even in 2026, the best of Indian cinema still does not live on Mubi or Netflix. It lives on torrent.

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