Santosh Sivan's "The Terrorist" (1999) was filmed in India in the Tamil language. He says it was inspired by the assassination of the Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1991. But in the movie, no country is identified, no name is attached to her target, and no ideology or religion is attached to her movement.

This is not a film about the rightness or wrongness of her cause or the political situation that inspired it. It simply and heartbreakingly observes for a few days as a young woman prepares to become a suicide bomber. Her story is told with a minimum of onscreen violence and little in the way of action scenes; if Truffaut was correct, and war movies argue for war by making it look exciting, "The Terrorist" looks the other way.

I watch the film in horrified fascination. To die of disease, age, accident or even in combat is a condition of the human destiny. But to choose the moment of your own death and take other lives because you believe an idea is bigger than yourself: What idea could justify that? At least in battle you hope to survive. To me, consciousness is the all-encompassing idea; without it, there are no ideas, and to destroy it is to destroy all ideas.

A movement that encourages suicide so that it can benefit from that annihilation is monstrously selfish: Let people like The Leader, who thanks Malli for her death by treating her to lunch, blow himself up, if he is so sure someone must.

But my discussion is outside the terms of the movie. "The Terrorist" is anchored in the everyday reality of Malli, played by Ayesha Dharker so expressively that we identify with her feelings even as we deplore her mission. Her "unforgettable face, with her wide, full mouth and enormous dark eyes, appears in nearly every frame," writes A.O. Scott, "often filling most of the screen, as if we might be able to find our way into Malli's mind through her pores."

After she volunteers for death, she is passed by a network of movement members to a farm where she will spend the last four days of her life. On this journey she is helped by a young boy named Lotus (Vishwas), who knows the territory; they wade in a river to avoid land mines, and he knows where all the booby traps are. He tells her that everyone he has guided has eventually been killed. He weeps: "There will be blood everywhere."