There’s one significant challenge to making ‘screen-life films’ (films that unfold almost entirely on digital screens). Once you commit to its visual grammar, you’re tied to them till there’s a good reason to break out of it.
No matter what, all your exposition needs to happen on the small screen, key plot points need to be hashed out during video calls, and the filmmakers need to keep imagining newer screens – ranging from iPad, mobile phones, CCTVs, GoPros, webcams, paparazzi lenses, TV screens etc.
It’s an obstacle that definitively trips Vikramaditya Motwane’s CTRL – when a character discusses a top-secret project and another character’s involvement with it, especially after their disappearance for example.
I might be projecting my expectations on the film here, but I find it hard to believe that a smart lawyer’s first hunch would be to discuss all this in a video chat, without the slightest hint that these devices might be under surveillance? I wondered if Motwane and writer Avinash Sampath were trapped in their own maze.
And it’s a shame, because in the very first five minutes I was intrigued and excited about Motwane’s film. I’ve always wondered about the blurred lines between a couple, whose off-screen love story becomes a performance for the public at large, and a gateway for financial prosperity. What happens when cracks develop within the personal equation – how does a couple negotiate the substantial financial blowback? It’s a fascinating equation to explore.
Joe and Nella are college sweethearts, who started their own YouTube channel ‘NJOY’ in the mid-2010s. They put out deliberately cringe explainers for their young audience (Five places to make out in school???). All hell breaks loose, when Nella wants to surprise Joe on their fifth anniversary, but instead she catches him cheating on her with another girl, Shonali.
For some reason, the camera accompanying Nella, keeps recording as she goes and fights Joe, Shonali and has a massive public meltdown, which predictably becomes fodder for memes, a Yashraj Mukhate song, and reaction videos. The couple breaks up, and Nella seeks refuge in wine and an AI (artificial intelligence) app that allows her to erase him from all their pictures together.
It was at this point that I realised the uphill task Motwane and his crew had taken up, and which might explain why they falter after this. CTRL is essentially a first-world film, seeking acceptance in the third world. This one-line agenda dictates a majority of the film’s decisions, which robs the film of its urgency. It’s hard to imagine a creator these days, unaware of Big Tech’s biases, and their infinitely complex-yet-skewed algorithms designed to uphold the status-quo.
Without much suspicion, Nella lets the AI app (called CTRL) take control of her professional comeback. Things are hunky dory initially – she becomes one of the hottest influencers in India, in a matter of months.
Joe frantically keeps calling and texting her to talk about something ‘important’, but she keeps ignoring him. And then one day, Joe goes missing. Nella is worried, so she starts looking for answers in his emails, his laptop. These scenes of retracing one’s digital footprint to find hints of what their life has been off late, reminded me of Aneesh Chaganty’s Searching (2018) – which jump-started this sub genre of cyber-thrillers.
What she discovers isn’t particularly shocking or interesting. Sampath, who earlier wrote AK vs AK (2020) with Motwane, draws his fair share of cheeky real-life parallels in this film too. An Oligarch’s name is Aryan K – a stand-in for Aryan Khan? After Nella tries to implicate the bad guys, she finds herself at the centre of a witch-hunt, where she gets arrested on the basis of obviously dubious circumstantial evidence, much like the shameful media trial of Rhea Chakraborty, during the Sushant Singh Rajput suicide case.
The film also takes shots at the bottomless pit of the current TV media, which has abandoned every last grain of integrity and empathy in India. There’s a bleeding-heart monologue on how ‘Big Tech is bad’ as if we’re still stuck in 2008. No shit, Sherlock.
Apart from the undigested medium (I assume Motwane, Sampath could have taken a bit more time with it), one of the film’s biggest weak spots is Ananya Panday’s Nella. It’s a thinly conceived character, who we only learn about only once the film exits her screen – when, in fact, we should have known more when we were on her screen.
This is the third time in the last ten months that Panday has played a representative of the Instagram generation. While this might be her darkest dive into the matter, it still doesn’t do much to elevate her diligence as an actor. There are stray references that she plays a Delhi person, resulting in Panday using phrases like ‘Bhooliyo matt!’, ‘Bakchodi’ and even ‘Cake thusa’ – but its never fully convincing.
Also, I never really bought an insult like ‘bagal ke baal se choti banaayegi’ (make a ponytail out of her armpit hair?) – a terrific Sumukhi Suresh line – which sounds far away from anything Nella can come up with. She never really says anything this acerbic again.
CTRL concludes strong, once the film exits the screen and comes out into the real world. There’s a terrific scene in a prison, where a lawyer tells Nella how a corporation is willing to spend crores of rupees, thousands of man-hours in lawyers, and spend years in legal hearings to systematically destroy her. There’s just no winning here. The scene is chillingly shot by Pratik Shah – who was also in Jubilee (2023) with Motwane.
The last stretch when Nella has flees back to her parents’ home in Delhi, reminded me of a Black Mirror episode, San Junipero. I could finally understand why Nella’s influencer career was so important to her, someone who is so lonely in real life that the virtual world has become her ‘real world’. I found myself wishing that the film hadn’t committed to the screen-life gimmick during its initial 80%, I think it would’ve been a more comprehensive film. Despite its strong finish, CTRL would only qualify as a tepid Black Mirror episode at best.
*CTRL is streaming on Netflix
