听 
Reared on English-language films, we are used to screen hit-men who come straight from central casting and monosyllabic obsessives who dispatch their victims with the casualness of someone who's just been shopping. Such films also glory in letting us see the splatter caused by their actions.
"The Terrorist", however, constitutes a completely different approach to committed killers, concentrating as it does on a 19-year-old girl who is not only defined by her duty to kill, but is revealed in all the complexity one finds in real folk. Furthermore, because the film is primarily a study of her experiences, motivation, and self-doubt, we are only given the tiniest hint of any violent action. Two spots of blood on the mask of a political activist, whose fellow gang-member has shot a traitor, is one example.
The girl in question is Malli (played by British actress Ayesha Dharker, one of the few professionals in the film), a highly committed Indian terrorist who - like other youngsters in her group - has been robbed of family, education, and youth, and believes that ultimate worth resides in suicide-assassination, in her case of a big-shot politician. While waiting for her moment, she lives with a chatterbox farmer, whose views on life cause her to place her motives under the microscope.
Dharker is extremely good at intense, quiet power, and communicates a great deal of depth - conflicting emotions, for instance - without saying a word. She is, in fact, silent for most of the film. Debut director Santosh Sivan, an ex-cameraman, naturally never shies away from beauty, but it is never once skin-deep, and even brief cutaway shots of a bird twitching, a row of girl-assassin faces, and the farmer's wife simply ring with meaning. Elegance with clout.
