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CTRL: Vikramaditya Motwane’s Effective Screenlife Thriller Is The Tragedy Of Our Times

With <em>CTRL</em> Motwane invites us to witness the fragility of digital privacy and needles our trained fingers through a premise that unfolds entirely on laptop and phone screens.

Ishita+Sengupta

Oct 04, 2024

Promo poster for CTRL.

YOU OPEN INSTAGRAM and scroll through pictures. Videos of influencers have infiltrated your feed. They all have happy, shiny faces and an excess to their existence. They are too excited, too content, and too eager about life. For them, every day is the ‘greatest ever’ and every meal they have is the ‘best they ever had’. Vikramaditya Motwane situates his screenlife thriller, CTRL, in this milieu of surplus. The setting informs his critique and accounts for the actions of the protagonist, an influencer, who downloads an app to cleanse her digital existence off her partner once he cheats. Extreme as it is, the reaction makes sense in context: having lived her life on her phone, the phone is her life.

Most Hindi films share a contentious relationship with social media. Stories, like videos going viral or pictures fetching likes, milk their broadest function to further the plot without examining the undersides. In this regard, Arjun Varain Singh’s incisive Kho Gaye Hum Kahan (2023) pushed the envelope by tracing the complicated relationship we share with social media and the many ways the apps we are on take control of our lives. Motwane’s latest feature CTRL is a sharper literalisation of this premise that unfolds entirely through the interface of laptop and phone screens.

This visual design draws a comparison with Aneesh Chaganty’s Searching (2018), a breakthrough thriller where a father tracked his missing daughter with the help of social media, and the computer screen doubles up as the big screen. Characters in CTRL go missing as well and the web of technology is used to find them. In that sense, Motwane borrows the conceit but he also extends it in his suggestion that in 2024, the only person truly lost in such an arrangement is the one looking at the screen.

The filmmaker reimagines the perils of the digital world by centring the story around its beneficiaries: the influencers. Nella Awasthi (Ananya Panday) and Joe Mascarenhas (Vihaan Samat) started dating in college. They made videos together, lived together and before long, took the next step: started a channel together. Everything was going well till Nella caught Joe kissing another girl. What could have been a wound turned out to be a shame. Nella wanted to surprise Joe on her birthday and the entire act was caught on live stream. But in the world stacked with eyeballs, is anything private anymore?

CTRL shares its universe with Dibakar Banerjee’s Love Sex Aur Dhokha 2 (2023) in the implication that everything on the Internet serves as fodder for something else. Except Motwane has a better realisation of the self-feeding beast that is social media. Nella’s violent reaction transforms into memes and other influencers assemble to react to it. Hurt and humiliated, she downloads an app called CTRL that helps her remove Joe from her digital life and streamline opportunities. And with the help of an AI assistant, Allen (voiced by Aparshakti Khurana), her career gets a jumpstart. Nella turns her breakup into a spectacle (her reaction video to Joe cheating rakes in millions of likes) and soon new revenue streams and brand collaborations open up.

Motwane has always had a keen eye, poignantly evident in his period drama series Jubilee (2023), and CTRL benefits tremendously from it. Little insinuations go a long way. Like Nella’s instinctive reaction to the breakup is, “He is my boyfriend, the whole world knows it,” only to be followed by a sombre admission to a common friend, “How will I earn money now?” The filmmaker includes them as expositions of her personality more than as a critique. As an influencer, she is too trained to be the centre of attention and when caught off guard, she lashes out at the other girl for not knowing her reality. The underlying allegation here is, “How dare you not follow me?” She is also a resident of Delhi where her father owns a small bakery. Although Nella dreads joining it, her line of business (at one point Joe refers to both of them as “glorified salesman”) is a modern update of it, much like her name. Nella’s original name is Nalini.

Panday is excellent as Nella. The character feels like a spiritual extension of Bae, the tech-savvy golden-hearted Delhi influencer she essayed in Call Me Bae (2024; incidentally Samat, ‘Joe’, too featured in the series ) but the actor also brings something individualistic this time. Her turn is marked by a lack of vanity and a loud proclamation of Panday being acutely aware of her capabilities. One can argue that she is making a career out of playing herself, a GenZ addicted to social media (Kho Gaye Hum Kahan and Gehraiyaan) but it is difficult to play oneself without resorting to embellishments of self-preservation.

CTRL gears into a thriller when Joe goes suddenly missing. This is also when the genre turns most effective. His friends and family call Nella and, as an influencer attuned to the roadmap of cyberspace, she starts following his digital footprints. His laptop is pulled out, his emails are searched through only for more and revelations to tumble out. It turns out that Joe was part of a tech group that worked for digital freedom. They were on the verge of an expose on a huge media conglomerate that is mining data from people only to access them illegally. It is a rare false note in an otherwise film (the connection does not add up) but Motwane manages to offset it by treating it with deftness. At no point does Nella express extreme surprise as if she realises that although their virtual personalities were conjoined (their channel was called Njoy), they knew little about each other in reality. The still treatment turns out to be an immersive tactic where he invites us to watch the fragility of digital privacy and needles our trained fingers.

Written by Motwane and Avinash Sampath (Sumukhi Suresh has furnished the dialogues), there are two ways of looking at CTRL. One is a bleak thriller that outlines the inevitability of living in a world of complete tech domination, prone to taking everything we have as hostage to algorithms. The in-built dystopia in the narrative fails to match up to reality and in that sense, the film is a horror story. The other is to view it as a bleak tragedy where the autonomy of social media and technology is so complete that fighting it becomes secondary, surrendering to it is tertiary and seeking refuge in it, despite being aware of its heinousness, ranks as the primary attribute.

CTRL is currently streaming on Netflix.