‘Logout’ Movie Review: Babil Khan Is the Life of This Sufficient Screen-Life Thriller

Director: Amit Golani
Writer: Biswapati Sarkar
Cast: Babil Khan, Nimisha Nair, Rasika Dugal, Gandharv Dewan
Language: Hindi
Streaming: ZEE5

For a hot second in 2023, the Internet turned on Babil Khan. The young actor, son of the late Irrfan, became the rare nepo-kid who got trolled for saying all the right things. His viral take on romantic relationships — where he batted for gender equality and called out the chauvinistic phrasing of “getting girls” — was treated with suspicion; he was accused of being too rehearsed, too pretentious. Social media was flooded with scrutiny and jokes about performative wokeness and green-flag syndromes. To his credit, Khan leans into this persona for Logout, a cyber thriller in which he plays a famous and chronically online influencer on the brink of breaching the 10-million-followers barrier.

His character, Pratyush “Pratman” Dua, advertises vegan brands, waxes lyrical about lived-in heartbreak (his popular skit is a Laila-Majnu parody), and shuts down abusive incels in a rival’s comments section. But the ‘offline’ Pratyush feasts on fried chicken takeaways, dumped his ex, secretly runs the fake incel accounts that his alter-ego schools, casually fat-shames his older sister (Rasika Dugal), stays estranged from his father, and regularly yells “F*ck you, bitch!” at his female rival’s Youtube channel. Pratyush is addicted to validation, and Khan does an uncanny job of weaponising the self-awareness that got him trolled not long ago. The social media creator he plays isn't oblivious to the fictions he peddles; he knows the extent of his own disingenuity, but thrives on being a slave to the algorithm. He sounds like the sort of sanctimonious influencer who’d urge his followers to celebrate mothers on the birth-days of their children.

So when Pratyush is taken digital hostage by a female fan — she steals his cell-phone, contacts him through a computer app and, by extension, controls his life — the duality becomes part of the conceit. It’s like watching Khan confessing that, for better or worse, even authenticity is fodder for content. He’s very perceptive and watchable, because he belongs to a generation that’s comfortable in front of screens (and cameras) rather than people. Every reaction of Pratyush is more competitive than natural — the way sports fans exude masculinity and unvarnished adrenaline at their TV sets. You can tell that he’s just not used to dealing with real-world emotions and people. Within the walls of his apartment, the same reflexes acquire an uncivilised bluntness.

A still from 'Logout'

The film itself offers nothing that hasn’t already been explored by digital cautionary tales like Kho Gaye Hum Kahan (2023) and CTRL (2024). The mandatory phones-are-evil and youth-is-imprisoned message is par for the course. (“There’s a reason they’re called ‘cell’-phones,” says the pre-film slate, with the seriousness of a witty boomer). As a morality thriller, it plays out like Phone Booth (2003) repurposed for the social media age: an anonymous caller forces enlightenment upon a brash character whose career is shaped by the art of deception. But Logout nicely channels the dopamine-kick energy of Khan. He is well-equipped to carry the screenlife portions — where Pratyush slowly realises he’s being ‘virtually kidnapped’ and gears through stages of fear, panic and investigative urgency.

The actor’s body language allows the film to unfold like a horror movie, where the ghost is our crippling dependence on technology. Watching Pratyush come to terms with a lost phone, his whole identity, is unnerving. The script has some intuitive touches. For instance, when Pratyush finds a relic from the prehistoric era — a landline — and tries to call for help without being detected, he can’t remember anyone’s number except his ex-girlfriend’s. He exercises unused muscles — like his memory — when he realises that all his passwords are stored on his phone; it’s uniquely scary to watch him access his bank account only to stumble at the OTP-sent-to-phone hurdle. As is the sight of Pratyush keeping an eye on his follower count and noticing that the ‘drama’ is actually helping.

One of the things the film gets right is the language and humour of trolls — especially the meme-coded responses to Pratyush using a fake account to divulge his situation. It quickly becomes a joke template. Khan seems to internalise the ironic frustration of someone who falls prey to the very monster he created. The girl’s (Nimisha Nair) voice and twang, too, conceal a few neat details. She sounds more middle-class than crazed, which ties into how life in specific social brackets is often perceived as a psychological condition. The para-social tension is rooted in the way she speaks to her hassled idol — it seamlessly evokes the delusions of living in the void between online reality and seeking reality online.

A still from 'Logout'

The problem with Logout isn't a deal breaker, but it's more of a gnawing genre trope. Stories like these tend to behave like sports movies that over-design a medium that's already dramatic. The stakes are raised too high — an AI avatar turning sentient and murderous (in CTRL), a missing daughter being abducted (Searching), a fangirl committing a crime (Logout) — in pursuit of an insidious and everyday truth. Pratyush is placed in a life-or-death situation, but the same result can be achieved without the crutch of plot twists, extreme actions and revelations. Just the loss of his phone and the no-holds-barred rush to reach 10 million followers is enough to expose the perils of commercialised influence. It’d be daunting to see him cross all boundaries on his own terms and then pay the price. But the movie-ness of his circumstances here works against the intangibility of screen addiction.

It's a challenge to explore the consequences of such an invisible way of existing — a challenge that the genre is not evolved enough to tackle yet. By giving Pratyush a clear nemesis, the film undermines the subtle complicity of social media in the anti-intellectualisation of art and the demonetisation of emotions. It’s like making a cricket movie and including a terrorist to awaken a batsman to the evils of T20 cricket. You don't need narrative gimmicks to stage the terror of an offline content creator. The title itself is a sign. At one level, “Logout” sounds like sagely advice to a generation to touch grass and smell the coffee. But at another level, it summons the withdrawal symptoms and crippling paranoia of those who step out of the house without a phone. The former is explicit commentary, the latter is implicit compliance.