CTRL Movie Review — Sucharita Tyagi
MANY times when I speak with directors ya writers, they say ki hamaari film 1990s mein set hai kyunki social media ka angle agar storty mein aa gaya toh screenplay ke conflicts khatam ho jaayenge, answers aajkal asaani se mil jaate hain harr cheez ke.
Ek adad insaan hain lekin Bollywood mein who over and over and over, baar baar social media waale plots ki taraf hi agrsar ho rahi hain.
I think Ananya Panday’s current career point is actually a treatise in the many ways real aur digital life ko separate ho hi nahi sakte ab.
Right after Call ME Bae, Aanaya is playing yet another character whose real name has given way to an unintelligible nickname. Nandini is now Nella, in the other one, Bae was Bella. I’m telling you, inki choice abhi study hai in what the world looks like for a 25-year-old, in Mumbai, with means and access.
Playing Ananya’s love interest one more time is Vihaan Samat. He is Nella’s live-in partner, Joe Masceranhas. Together they run a hugely successful video vlogging channel. Things are seemingly perfect, until they're not, the couple breaks up. Nella uses an AI tool to purge Joe from her life. Things take a weird turn when Joe also goes missing IRL. Has AI become sentient and killed him? Or has he just decided to go underground kyunki frankly I can't imagine what it is like to run a vlogging channel and not want to run away from it all, on a daily basis. Aesthetics ki tension kitni aur kab tak hi lega insaan bhai.
Shot for the most part in the “Screenlife” format made popular by 2018’s Searching, pandemic ke pehle saal mein Fahadh Faasil, Darshana Ranejndra “C U Soon” also was there, Motwane’s CTRL is the kind of movie that makes you feel guilty about spending 5 hours on Instagram, and through its runtime make you replace the guilt with paranoia. Light hearted Gen-Z rom-com ke premise se shuru hokar lekin is Motwane + Avinash Sampath screenplay ko Black Mirror tak jaane mein time lagta hai thoda extra. Perhaps because of this film they’d started writing in 2020, when YouTube erupted as a medium. NOW the looming threat of AI aur iski unwanted ghuspaith hamaari life mein, CTRL ki target audience ki lives ke kaafi centre mein hai ALREADY hai as a conversation. Pichle hafte, Meta keg l; asses se baatein karet karet, Chat GPT ke through nayi bhaasheyein kaise seehkein iske lessons ki poori demonstration di hai mere bhai ne gaadi mein baithe baithe, FREE versions par. Toh the fact the we spend so much time in the era even BEFORE AI comes into the picture, are very familiar bits and pieces. Yashraj Mukhate comes in and makes a song, stand-up comics turn streamers to make unfunny jokes about women for too long, Nella bounces back and uses hashtags to tell people her life is back on track. Urfi Javed bhi dikh jaati, agar haal hi main Dibakar Bannerjee ki LSD 2 mein nahi nazar aayi hoti providing commentary on our relationship with online fame.
And yeh irony bhi mujh par lost nahi hai ki impatience ki nadhti Bhawana viewer ke andar bhi hi social media overuse ki wajah se hi hai. But at the 42-minute mark, and one can check this sort of thing because one is now watching movies ALSO online when the real conflict shows up, I was glad to provide CTRL my full attention once again. It's here you fully realize that it wasn’t just Nella watching her AI friend talk to her all this while, the screen is watching her just the same. The more information she asks the artificial intelligence to remove, the more information she has to provide. The realization ki hum sab hi aaj nahi toh kal iss chakkar mein phasne waale hain becomes stronger, and a fear sets in. Nella could be me, in lonely days when either I don’t have someone to share with or I can't be arsed calling up a human person.
Think about it. Aage hi 30s mein pohonchte pohonchte friend circle chhota ho jaata hai. Ab agar bache khuche 3–4 logon se bhi baat karne ki zaroorat na padey, toh koi kyun nahi bann jaayega Spike Jonze ki ‘Her’ ka Theodore Twombly? SCarlette Johansson ki jagah, is film mein virtual assistant hai Aparshakti Khurana, who in real life spend years as a Radio show host. I know because we used to host radio shows together. FM ki waves, virtual reality se chaahe kitni hi door thi, lekin in a manner of speaking we were selling the same thing there, a friend you can't see, don’t know, but is there to give you relatable life advice. Only NOW this friend can permanently alter your brain chemistry before you know it.
Point is, that everything in this Vikramaditya Motwane film is thought out, and pointed. Sumukhi Suresh’s dialogue while it might not be extraordinary memorable, they’re necessary because as a middle-aged millennial and content creator, she is well versed with internet speak. Thanks to the combined know-how of this writing team, characters don’t just post one thing, and their overnight virality is conveyed via a montage of tweets popping up editing to 10 over-lapping voiceovers about the content of the viral clip. You KNOW what I'm talking about no.
Interactions with social media in CTRL don’t just feel genuine, they feel urgent. Motwane clearly spends time thinking about where storytelling came from, evident in his last work Jubilee, and where it's heading in 2024. His 2023 docu-series Indira’s Emergency still doesn’t have a home, toh uska pata nahi, but CTRL feels a personal search for answers. His colorist Sid Meer, photographer wife Ishika, his production house Andolan and others im sure I missed show up as names in comments and emails, his 9 year old daughter Akira is even credited as an assistant director.
So yeah, what makes CTRL eery is how relatable Nella’s spiral feels. She too watches videos on “anxiety relief” and between that plus the stand-up comedy clip, I saw my own algorithm reflected on screen. It’s that casual 2 AM scroll, where you’re switching between dog videos, existential TED Talks, and yet another “5 Steps to Improve Your Life” video that never works. Nella is basically us, in the very VERY near future, her life is falling apart at the hands of a malicious AI.
Darr lagta hai soch kar ki wi-fi ka signal kabhi kharaab ho jaata hai toh itne naraaz kaise automatically ho jaate hain. Duniya ruk jaati hai, din ke koi maayne nahi reh jaate. No one has answers, even those working in the field don’t know where things are headed. Perhaps this is why CTRL also feels incomplete. The threat of the evil AI making company Joe Masceranahs warns about, doesn’t feel high stakes enough, and a lot of the built up anticipation, just sorts of marinates as a cautionary footnote.
However Motwane’s insights and explorations are honest, aur ghar baithe, Netflix par film dekh lo.
So, on a scale of 1 to 10, CTRL is….100 baar extra soch liya karo doston kisi website par naya login banaane se pehle. Aankh band karke accept all dabaate joh jaa rahe hain, maybe rukein hain thoda sa?
