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‘Stolen’ Movie Review: Abhishek Banerjee Stars in a Sharp and Perceptive Survival Thriller
Karan Tejpal’s film is frank enough to question its own reflection in the mirror.
Director: Karan Tejpal
Writers: Karan Tejpal, Gaurav Dhingra, Swapnil Salkar-Agadbumb
Cast: Abhishek Banerjee, Shubham Vardhan, Mia Maelzer, Harish Khanna, Sahidur Rahaman
Streaming on: Amazon Prime Video
Language: Hindi
Stolen tells an NH10-coded story of two city-slicking brothers who — in trying to aid a police investigation of a stolen baby from a rural railway station — get sucked into a heartland nightmare. A drowsy Gautam (Abhishek Banerjee) waits in his black SUV to pick up his younger sibling, Raman (Shubham Vardhan), whose train arrives late. Before they exit the platform, they bump into Jhumpa Mahato (Mia Maelzer), a distraught young mother who accuses Raman of abducting her toddler while she was asleep. The cops get involved; the confusion comes to light. Much to Gautam’s chagrin, Raman is consumed by an urge to help the woman. But they pay the price for being human. Things spiral quickly in a search that features a cursed manor, rehab center, angry mobs, baby-snatching gangs and illegal surrogacy rackets. The brothers find themselves trapped in a dark survival thriller. The question that emerges, however, is troubling: whose survival?
The overarching theme of Stolen is potent, if all too familiar. It stems from the collision of two India’s: the privileged one-percenters and the ‘rest’. The film is situated entirely in the friction caused by this encounter — an encounter that, in theory, advertises virtues like trust, empathy and curiosity. The specifics of the plot remain a bit vague. Doubts are raised over Jhumpa’s identity and motives; her circumstances are never fully clear; the chaos and inter-cutting in the climax lack context and coherence. But the big-picture perspective of Karan Tejpal’s film is compelling. It works more as a whole than a sum of its frantic parts.
The narrative physically reflects the conflict — and everyday dynamic — between its seen and unseen worlds. For instance, it immediately opens with Jhumpa and the shot of the baby being stolen by a mysterious person. In other words, it begins as a story of a tragic mother from a marginalised community. For a moment, this is her film. Given that this is the first scene, the average viewer isn’t attentive or tuned in enough to grasp every detail; the train of her life is already running. In seconds, though, Jhumpa’s story itself is forced to jostle for space. The camera finds Gautam and Raman, and it’s almost as if they hijack the spotlight from her.
For the rest of the film, most scenes look like they cut ‘away’ from the increasingly desperate brothers when we see or hear Jhumpa. Her track keeps fighting for visibility, but her off-screen voice is reduced to a background score. When there’s an accident at some point, the cops’ first worry is paperwork, the brothers are concerned about their own fate, but only Jhumpa’s crisis stays unchanged. Her baby is still missing, and nobody is listening. In a way, the title of the film also alludes to the narrative agency stolen from a tribal woman, whose mere existence becomes a reminder that many like her can’t even afford to be a victim. She barely has the right to need, but here, she is denied the right to bleed.
What I really like about Stolen is that it doesn’t pretend to hide its own blind spots. The decision to unfold from the point of view of the two urbane characters is a conscious one. It not only reflects the honest gaze of the makers and the fact that it’s these brothers who are the ‘hostile outsiders’ in this nameless region, it also reveals a sociocultural chasm that cannot be overcome with good intent and bleeding-heart-liberal vibes alone. Many of the action scenes mirror this vantage point; the camera does a Children-of-Men-styled gimmick of shooting the rawness of a chase from the insides of the car. When Gautam stops for a smoke and a mob slowly corners him, we see this scene escalate with muffled noises from the backseat. It looks like Jhumpa’s perspective, her eyes, but when they return to the car, she’s no longer sitting there — one of the film’s many visual metaphors.
The characterisation, too, is smart. Raman is a photographer, the sensitive artiste, so he is driven by a brand of naivety and idealism that people like him are wired to romanticise. This is his way of “standing up for something” and making a difference. Gautam is the practical and rich one; his first instinct is to bribe his way out and mind their own business. Together, they represent the two sides of the same entitled mind in a moral predicament: should they inconvenience themselves to help someone or should they do the common thing and walk away? Raman treats Jhumpa as a portrait, a grainy subject in his imaginary frame. When he commits to the night, he has no choice but to convince himself that she is genuine. He is entitled enough to expect her to justify his leap of faith. Gautam, in turn, does it for Raman and the unresolved tension between them.
The two male protagonists also take the plunge because, in their heads, they’re progressive enough to be attending their mother’s (second) wedding. It’s why Raman arrives from out of town; the sons are reuniting for a parent that’s daring to break the mold. Raman is provoked by the cops sneering at this piece of information; he wants to walk the talk. It’s the liberal-guilt syndrome, where the upper-class brothers reinforce their own values and education by ‘accepting’ a task that atones for their privilege. What they don’t realise is that the mob in pursuit of them — where the word of “two kidnappers in an SUV” spreads like wildfire across local vigilance groups — is baying for more than just blood. The keypad warriors and lynchers of this North Indian hinterland are blinded by confirmation biases and hollow resentments fuelled by an establishment that brainwashes them into assigning blame. Their lawless rage resembles that of the prisoners in The Dark Knight Rises (2012), who take over Gotham and have its elite killed kangaroo courts — all as revenge for being disenfranchised. They treat Gautam and Raman as all-in-one surrogates for a society that rewards hatred and fetishises injustice. One almost empathises with the attackers, because the film mines its own complicity in this cycle of discrimination.
The performances do a number on our notions of a survival drama. Banerjee and Vardhan, as the two brothers, do well to suggest that they’re constantly coming to terms with the mess they’re in. At first, the young men almost look disappointed with the world for demonising them rather than thanking them for their benevolent gesture. But the reality keeps expanding, and they behave like they’re always pinching themselves to wake up. They share a history that the film doesn’t harp on; it is instead felt through every reluctant act of solidarity and spite. Maelzer’s role is trickier to process as Jhumpa because the woman is supposed to be both ambiguous and soulful. At times, she sounds like a self-aware movie character (especially when she speaks of how “this is our life; we go where we find work”). But the actor’s ability to gear through multiple stages of grief while being stranded in someone else’s sphere of influence defines the film.
As a result, when Stolen is in danger of succumbing to the very urban-saviour complex it claims to subvert, there’s always a sense that the men’s heroism and suffering are selfish too. When one of them goes through a transformation, it’s not some social-message awakening where he suddenly ‘sees’ Jhumpa and decides to act. It’s still shaped by the madness and trauma of seeing his brother in trouble; it becomes a matter of ego. Of the many things stolen in the film — a five-month-old baby, a woman’s voice and agency, motherhood, power, sanity — it says something that the stealing of male dignity echoes the loudest. It says more that the film at once exposes this truth and confesses to it.