Yash Raj Films has spent years teaching audiences how to read its spies before they speak. Tiger carries weary romanticism. Pathaan gets swagger stretched to myth. Kabir can stand still and let the camera build his reputation. Sita and Durga enter a franchise where star aura often functions as character development, and Alpha must create two new legends while the old ones still dominate.
Shiv Rawail’s film is the first female-led entry in the YRF Spy Universe, with Alia Bhatt as Sita and Sharvari as Durga. The story, credited to Uday Chopra, places them inside the Alpha programme, a military project built around a regenerative serum. Rogue officer Colonel Fateh Singh Lakhawat, played by Bobby Deol, wants soldiers who heal rapidly and survive extraordinary punishment.
Sita is his prized result. Raised in a remote facility and trained as a weapon, she reaches adulthood determined to destroy the man who made her. Her mission pulls her toward R&AW chief Vikrant Kaul, played by Anil Kapoor, and Kaul’s daughter Durga. Hindi action cinema gains two women who can occupy blockbuster scale without being treated as a novelty. The franchise is less certain about the emotional and political language surrounding them.
A Serum and a Family Wound
The post-Kargil prologue gives Alpha its sharpest political idea. Vikrant understands victory through its dead. Fateh sees the same war and imagines a stronger body, one that cannot break so easily. His Alpha programme turns military grief into a scientific project. Hindi cinema has long made patriotism emotional before ideological. Here, grief is the doorway.
Fateh’s nationalism is possessive. He treats human beings as material for national power. Bobby Deol’s de-aged flashback appearance gives him cold authority, his squared posture and clipped delivery selling moral hesitation as a defect.
The experiment becomes personal when Vikrant’s pregnant wife Janki, played by Dia Mirza, develops a life-threatening heart condition. She refuses to end the pregnancy. Vikrant secretly injects her with the serum. The treatment proves fatal. Janki dies during childbirth, and Fateh lies about the newborn’s fate.
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Vikrant’s decision turns love into catastrophic control. Anil Kapoor gives the character weight by letting pauses replace command in quieter scenes. The script barely examines how a man with such disastrous judgement later becomes R&AW chief. Kapoor’s authority survives the character’s résumé.
Sita grows up in Fateh’s Rajasthan facility among scientist Verghese, male fighters, and a pet guinea pig used as an awkward conversational device. Her adult social ease creates a credibility gap. Confinement somehow produces dry humor, casual glamour, and functional interpersonal instincts. Her childhood is traumatic when the plot needs pain and porous when the star vehicle needs charm.
Her hatred of Fateh works because the history is concrete. He trained her, controlled her body, and made violence the only language she could speak fluently. Every time Sita turns that language against him, the film has a motive stronger than its slogans.
Sisters Before Spies
Alia Bhatt’s adult introduction is built around motion. Sita punches, kicks, shoots, and cuts through bodies before the film asks her to explain herself. Bhatt commits to the combat vocabulary. Her shoulders stay tight, her expression controlled, and her body appears permanently prepared for the next attack.
Rawail sometimes distrusts what Bhatt is already doing. The score announces her ferocity with “Tu hi toh agni hai re” whenever Sita enters combat mode. Hindi cinema has long used music to enlarge screen presence, from hero-introduction songs to mass-action cues. Alpha turns that tradition into branding. The soundtrack calls Sita fire while Bhatt proves it physically.
Sharvari’s Durga works from the opposite emotional register. She has lived outside Sita’s prison, spent time in Spain, and retains reservations about killing. Her lighter energy is written so insistently as bubbly that she risks becoming an assigned source of warmth. Sharvari pushes back through physical precision.
Their midway face-off is action revealing character. Sita attacks like someone trained to finish a threat. Durga adjusts and searches for openings. Their cooperation becomes easier to accept because the fight has already shown how differently they read danger.
The relationship that follows should carry the film. Sita has never experienced family without surveillance or affection without control. Durga can argue with her and remain present afterward. The Ladakh stretch offers fragments of this idea, yet the screenplay races through the change. Trust arrives after too few shared moments, with family revelations squeezed between rogue programmes and franchise business.
A scene where Sita experiences disagreement without punishment could reveal her damage better than another loyalty speech. A meal where she does not know how to behave around Durga could show captivity’s social cost. The script gives Sita a guinea pig to talk to, then assumes intimacy will come naturally.
Bhatt finds flashes of tenderness anyway. Watch her face when Sita’s attention shifts from tracking danger to listening to Durga. The jaw loosens before the dialogue catches up. Sharvari meets that change without turning Durga into a therapist. Their chemistry is strongest here and in the action scenes.
Bodies the Camera Can Read
The fights give Alpha confidence. Stunt coordinator Melroy Dsilva and fight choreographers Ian Stock and Craig Macrae let Bhatt and Sharvari complete movements inside the frame. A leap has a beginning and impact. A parry leads into the next strike without three edits hiding the transition. When Sita moves through soldiers, the audience can follow her route.
That clarity matters when Hollywood superhero action often treats cutting as camouflage. Alpha borrows from Western comic-book cinema, yet its strongest fights use an older principle: the star’s body must stay visible long enough to become the spectacle.
Captain America and the Winter Soldier hover over the serum plot, while Black Widow shadows the damaged assassin and improvised family material. Rawail translates those ingredients into Hindi star cinema, where entrances, music cues, and physical iconography carry weight. The fusion works when choreography leads and falters when lyrics underline the image.
The Sita-Durga fight benefits from this restraint. Their full bodies remain legible, and their separate styles create tension before the relationship changes. Sita’s group battles have the same advantage. Bhatt flips, leaps, and uses weapons across several opponents, with the camera giving her room to sell the effort.
Kashmir, Rajasthan, Ladakh, remote compounds, and off-grid hideouts give the film a different texture from the franchise’s postcard hopping. Muddy greens, browns, and greys dominate. The palette can look drab, yet the geography keeps the military and family history close.
Action loses force when it detaches from that history. Sita fighting Fateh carries years of abuse inside every strike. Anonymous soldiers carry no similar charge.
Then Kabir arrives. Hrithik Roshan’s extended appearance finds the War agent in a monastery, making mandalas and joking that he used to be dangerous. Roshan knows how little he needs to do. His stillness creates anticipation, and the shared action stretch with Sita and Durga gives Rawail’s staging a lighter rhythm.
The cameo exposes a franchise problem. YRF built its action grammar around male stars whose screen histories enter the scene before them. Sita and Durga are creating that mythology from zero. Giving Kabir the film’s most effortless cool risks making the old guard the measuring stick inside the new heroes’ own story.
Who Gets to Be Superhuman?
The Alpha serum is a revealing device for a female-led Hindi action film. Tiger, Pathaan, and Kabir rarely need scientific explanations for their impossible bodies. Their skill belongs to star mythology. Sita receives regenerative biology and years of controlled training before the franchise permits similar physical dominance.
Mainstream Hindi cinema places two women at the front of a large spy spectacle, yet the script still explains how one became formidable. The serum gives Sita power while framing it as something manufactured by men who experimented on her.
The film has material to interrogate this. Fateh’s programme turns patriotism into ownership of the body. Vikrant’s decision to inject Janki turns love into another form of control. Sita’s rebellion could link both ideas, giving her a personal refusal of men who make choices about women’s bodies while claiming noble motives.
The second half pushes her toward a cleaner nation-first position. The psychological bridge is weak. A woman raised in captivity and brutalized by military experiment begins speaking the language of service with surprising speed. Kaul’s declaration that India is “the best boss around” belongs to the Spy Universe’s familiar patriotic register, yet it lands awkwardly beside Sita’s history.
The dialogue makes the problem louder. “Alpha is all skill, no luck” explains a programme we have watched in operation. A scientist announces Sita’s high IQ rather than giving her a scene where her intelligence changes the mission. “Iss baar Sita Lanka khud jalayegi” has force because the mythological reference fits Sita’s revolt against her captor. Too many other lines sound like trailer copy waiting for a music sting.
Music has long collapsed the distance between private emotion and public spectacle in Hindi cinema. Alpha uses action tracks as promotional signatures, resetting Sita to combat mode. A recurring phrase tied to Janki, Fateh, or Sita’s childhood could have changed alongside her identity. The songs keep returning to fire.
Sita and Durga are positioned for future missions beside Kabir and the established Spy Universe figures. Their shared fight scenes prove they can command the physical arena. The harder question belongs to YRF: can the franchise build stories from these women’s histories, or will they inherit the slogans, cameos, and superhuman rituals designed for the men who arrived first?
The dystopian body-horror drama Alpha premiered at the Cannes Film Festival on May 19, 2025, and saw theatrical rollouts spanning late 2025 through early 2026, with North American distribution handled by Neon. The narrative follows a rebellious thirteen-year-old girl whose life and family dynamics fracture after an unsterilized tattoo needle exposes her to an eerie epidemic that physically transforms its victims. Audiences looking to watch the film can look for it through Neon’s streaming partners and digital video-on-demand platforms.
Where to Watch Alpha (2026) Online
Full Credits
Title: Alpha
Distributor: Neon, Diaphana Distribution, O’Brother Distribution, Curzon Film
Release date: May 19, 2025
Rating: FSK 16
Running time: 128 minutes
Director: Julia Ducournau
Writers: Julia Ducournau
Producers and Executive Producers: Eric Altmayer, Nicolas Altmayer, Jean des Forêts, Amélie Jacquis, Jean-Rachid Kallouche, Arnaud Chautard, Jean-Yves Roubin, Cassandre Warnauts
Cast: Mélissa Boros, Golshifteh Farahani, Tahar Rahim, Emma Mackey, Finnegan Oldfield, Louai El Amrousy, Jean-Charles Clichet, Marc Riso, François Rollin
Director of Photography (Cinematographer): Ruben Impens
Editors: Jean-Christophe Bouzy
Composer: Jim Williams
The Review
Alpha
Alpha gives the YRF Spy Universe a pair of women capable of carrying its bruising action vocabulary, and its clearest victories come when Alia Bhatt and Sharvari are allowed to fight without the soundtrack shouting instructions at us. The serum mythology borrows freely from Western superhero cinema, while the patriotic rhetoric pulls the film back toward familiar Hindi action formulas. Between those traditions sits a stronger story about stolen childhood and paternal guilt that Shiv Rawail never gives enough room to breathe.
PROS
- Strong Bhatt and Sharvari pairing
- Readable, athletic fight choreography
- Bobby Deol's imposing presence
- India-rooted locations add texture
CONS
- Family drama feels rushed
- Heavy-handed patriotic dialogue
- Derivative super-soldier mythology
- Kabir cameo exposes charisma gaps
