‘Incognito’ Short Film Review: Once Upon A Voyeur

The manager (Vikram Singh) of a seedy by-the-hour motel has hidden cameras installed in the rooms. He has a folder of amateur sex videos on his computer. He makes his money by uploading the footage of unsuspecting couples onto porn sites. But he is jolted by what he sees in the room of his latest customers: a middle-aged trafficker (Dev Chauhan) and a frightened young woman (Ayushi Nema). It’s almost like he’s thrown into a ‘real-world’ situation after viewing most customers through the lens of grainy fiction on a screen. Suddenly he has a conscience. He feels the urge to do something, anything. But that would also mean the risk of implicating himself.

The manager here is a descendant in a long line of cinematic heritage. The moral conflict of the voyeur is a vintage storytelling trope — from Hitchcock’s Rear Window and Kieslowski’s A Short Film About Love and D.J. Caruso’s Disturbia. The young man has a cheap side hustle, of course, but it’s not like it’s pure business; he finds himself watching these videos in his spare time. He’s making a living as an indifferent vendor in his head, but he enjoys sifting through his collection quietly. The filmmaking is such that the camera is almost intruding on the guy who’s defined by secret cameras; Vikram Singh’s shifty body language does half the job. It would have been easier for the story to paint him as a regular guy ‘forced’ to do bad things to earn a living. That’s how most narratives tend to see well-meaning but dark anti-heroes. There’s a bit of Dibakar Banerjee and a bit of Anurag Kashyap (a curator of this short) in the setup.

But the merit of this film lies in how it subverts the nihilism of the staging and reframes it as a more political comment on Indian masculinity. Given that he wants to rescue the female stranger in the room, we might be conditioned to forgive his misdeeds and view him as an unlucky redemption tale. After all, there’s nothing quite as seductive as a god-fearing male saviour whitewashing his past sins in Hindi cinema. One of the early shots even shows him praying every morning before getting to work. He’s a familiar portrait of hypocrisy; it’s lost on him that he’s reduced the dignity of other female customers to commodities for sale.

To the credit of Incognito, the manager isn’t let off the hook. The film doesn’t get carried away by modern social media discourse. He’s the more dangerous prototype: the predator disguised as a Good (or Woke) Guy. The pervert who hides behind the charade of female empowerment and performative slogans; the demon who’s forever in incognito mode. Every field is full of them. He’s arguably more of a threat than the broad-daylight monster who checks in with the woman. One of them is pretending, the other one is not. One of them is the devil, the other is the deceptive deep sea. At some point, it’s clear that the protagonist was always the woman. It’s just that the wrong cameras are on her. Some call it an invasion of privacy; others call it the male gaze.