Rahul Desai

Most directors make you feel like you’re watching their film — their technical prowess, their intent, their voice, their commercial and arthouse ambitions. But directors like Vasan Bala make you feel like you’re watching their dreams come true. His movies aren’t shown, they’re shared. His craft isn’t flaunted, it’s realised. In Jigra, there are no shots, only fulfilled aspirations. There are no scenes and set pieces, only childhood memories. There is no action, only the physicality of emotion. There is no story, only the narrativisation of storytelling.

Raat Jawaan Hai unfolds as an uncharacteristically warm and vibrant answer to a question popular Hindi cinema is too streamlined to ask: what happens after the end credits of the quintessential buddy comedy have rolled? Call it “Little Things for young parents” or “Dil Chahta Hai for reluctant adults”, but the fact that Raat Jawaan Hai fuses two seemingly exclusive genres of life — the friendship triangle and the marital drama — is, in itself, a minor triumph.

Being a true-crime drama in the Indian streaming landscape is like being an aspiring batsman in India’s cramped bylanes and crowded fields. Everybody is one — and everybody is advised to be one. Consequently, it’s harder to stand out. The default level has to be high: an engrossing story, a solid cast, a sense of place and time, technical competence. Most shows opt for an atmospheric setting to conceal a convoluted plot; the logic is that a visually striking tone will compensate for pacing and structural issues. In other words, the style can distract from a lack of substance. But Manvat Murders, helmed by Aatmapamphlet (2023) director Ashish Avinash Bende, is a Marathi-language series that does the reverse.

In 2018, Aneesh Chaganty’s Searching put the life in screenlife. It marked the natural progression of ‘screenlife storytelling’ — a visual format where events happen entirely on computer screens, smartphones and cameras — into the real world. Until then, the horrors of technology had been literalised by the found-footage and supernatural genres. But Searching featured a father who looks for his missing daughter by following her digital footprints. His internet sleuthing reveals how little he really knew her; the technology he uses to find her is what had isolated her to begin with. Vikramaditya Motwane’s CTRL goes a step further; it expands the plausibility of the genre by unfolding in an age that puts the screen in screenlife. CTRL marks its progression into the reality of a virtual world — one where being watched is simply a natural consequence of feeling seen.