CTRL

Conjuring up a life that plays out in a virtual space - in other words, setting up a gauzy existence that floats in a dimension far removed from the real and the tangible - has its wages. Vikramaditya Motwane’s inventive, sparky CTRL examines the nature and extent of the toll that burrowing into a rabbit hole of constructed personas and enhanced engagements can extract.

A cautionary tale on cybercrime and artificial intelligence, CTRL works like a ready reckoning on online behaviour for social media junkies and feels like it has been designed to showcase the budding talent of Ananya Panday. Many of us have yet to recover from the shenanigans of Bae when director Vikramaditya Motwane unleashes the effervescence of Ananya in yet another variant of the coming-of-age template for Gen-Z.

With Ctrl, a cautionary tale about the world’s obsession and our near-total dependence on online apps, Vikramaditya Motwane has moved firmly into the future. Or is it the present? Isn’t this what the geeks have been creating with their gaming universes, where your digital avatars are the better, shinier versions of you? Where they slay all the monsters, and leave you — or rather, your avatar — fully in control?

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.