‘The Diplomat’ review: Escape from Islamabad

Hindi cinema’s pathological obsession with Pakistan is so consistent that I just take it as a given now. Sometimes a film so virulent and stupid comes along—Gadar 2 (2023), Fighter (2024)—that it breaks the surface, but mostly it’s a lot of forgettable posturing and flag-waving. On some rare occasions, a film will introduce notes of doubt, or grace. I’ve come to expect it from Yash Raj’s action films, which treat cross-border matters with a strange mixture of cartoon villainy, human feeling and grudging respect. Sometimes it happens unexpectedly, like the recent war film Sky Force, which starts off strident but deescalates as it goes along. 

It's not like The Diplomat doesn’t take cheap shots. Every 20 minutes or so, someone will caution J.P. Singh (John Abraham), the Indian deputy high commissioner in Islamabad, upon which he’ll smirk and say something along the lines of, “This is Pakistan, one expects trouble here.” But Shivam Nair’s film doesn’t have the pulp nastiness of Gadar 2; the villainy is confined to a specific group, and the judicial system and top echelons of power come out looking surprisingly good.  

The film begins with a journey, a woman in a burqa (Sadia Khateeb) escorted by two men from a mountain village in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa to Islamabad. At the Indian embassy, the men hang back as the woman approaches the official at the window. As soon as they’re out of sight, she lifts her veil, urgently says she’s an Indian citizen, Uzma Ahmed. She begs the man at the counter to let her in. He hesitates, then checks with his superiors. She’s eventually brought inside. 

We learn that Uzma was in Malaysia when she met Tahir (Jagjeet Sandhu), a Pakistani citizen whom she fell in love with. She accepts an offer to travel to his home in Pakistan and get her young daughter from a previous marriage, who has thalassemia, treated there. By the time she realises Tahir runs a trafficking ring with the men of his village, it’s too late. It takes a while for her to convince J.P. of her predicament—both the Indians and Pakistanis think she could be a spy. Once he’s on board, there’s still a problem: how to get Uzma out of Pakistan safely, with an increasingly irate Tahir pulling political strings and stirring up his people?  

In his last two films, John Abraham has played shepherd to a young woman in peril. Vedaa (2024), in which his loner ex-soldier helps a Dalit girl persecuted by upper-caste goons in Rajasthan, was a more typical offering, alternating fights and shootouts with gritty social drama. The Diplomat, though, is a thriller but not an action film. Abraham, with his neat moustache, formal clothes and reasonable tone, is a little stiff, though his solidity is reassuring next to Khateeb’s tremulousness. 

Though his film is entirely set there, Nair isn’t interested in Pakistan. There’s no glimpses of life outside the embassy—apart from the grim scenes in the village—and no real insight into the nation's culture or politics. As J.P. reminds someone, even the embassy is, in a way, Indian soil. Midway through the film, I was reminded of Airlift (2016), another taut Hindi thriller that takes place in an Islamic nation, in which the action hero lead doesn’t throw a punch but finds a way to get Indian citizens home safely. It’s only later I realised both films share a writer in Ritesh Shah. 

There’s been no dearth in the last decade of films that insist upon India’s greatness (mostly in relation to Pakistan). The Diplomat is a change: a simple presentation of a modest undertaking, and a moral one, spearheaded by the real J.P. Singh and then foreign minister Sushma Swaraj in 2017. That it is one more film that praises the decisive decision-making of the BJP government is another thing Hindi viewers will probably take as a given.   

Also read: ‘Nadaaniyan’ review: The kids never stood a chance