Rohan Naahar

Normally, one of the most frustrating things that a movie can do is to abandon its characters and become too consumed by the plot. Our mainstream cinema has always struggled with this, and things have only become worse in the streaming era. It is said that show runners, in particular, can get away with anything on digital platforms as long as there is a murder in the first episode. Well, someone most certainly dies at the end of the first act in CTRL, the new film from Vikramaditya Motwane — his first feature since AK vs AK in 2020.

You’d think that the world was a less paranoid place five years ago, when the collective trauma of the pandemic hadn’t clobbered us on the head with a comically large mallet. But remember when governments were put on high alert before the release of a comic book movie about a murderous clown? Prepared for the riots that the supposedly incendiary film might incite, teams of police were stationed outside certain screenings of Todd Phillips’ Joker — a movie that was viewed by alarmists as a sort of dog whistle for basement-dwelling incels.