Logout

After distancing himself from his family and having just broken up with his girlfriend Smriti, Instagram influencer Pratyush lives alone in his apartment. He’s under pressure to reach the 10 million mark on the platform while competing with a rival. However, his plans go kaput one night when he loses his phone, only to realise that an obsessed female fan stole it. Babil Khan may not be getting the opportunities he deserves, but he is definitely making his presence felt in the digital space with his consistency, representing realities that mainstream cinema often tends to ignore. Logout is no different and is a story apt for his age, driven by a strong screenplay and eliciting a good performance out of him.

We all are prisoners of our mobile phones. So, when the very first line of ‘Logout’ reminds you of it as well as drives home precisely why it’s called a cell phone, you can only nod in unison. The same can be said about the entire runtime of the two-hour film. Much of what unfolds is relatable, much has already been documented, maybe with greater precision and depth. But the Amit Golani directorial focuses on the life of an influencer and serves the tale as a psychological thriller; murder in the very first scene. You might be on a familiar path; after all, reams have been penned on the perils of social media, invasion of privacy and cyber frauds. But the way Golani weaves a world where ‘phone hamare liye distraction nahin puri duniya hai’, you are neither distracted by the subject nor its treatment. Rather, you are fully clued in on the fate of this young celebrity.

There are two sides to digital media influencer connections. The first is the connection created by these influencers—designed, manufactured, marketed, finessed, and posted on their socials. These are aimed at gaining likes, shares, and follows, all to increase the creator’s relevance and brand value. On the other side of the mobile device screen, someone else is consuming this content—often obsessively, even addictively. Writer Biswapati Sarkar’s script for Logout (Zee5) is a cautionary tale that examines how an alarming number of subscribers are entrapped by their ‘cell’ phones.

Logout is one more addition in the recent spate of shows and films unpacking the dangers of online excess: it certainly looks like that subject is here to stay, because the addiction-adrenaline-endorphin-glut doesn’t show any signs of slowing down. Pratyush Dua, aka Pratman (Babil Khan) is an ‘influencer’ with a follower count inching close to the magic figure of ten million. His closest rival is a pretty girl whose chief constituency is ‘single desperate ladke’, whose one ‘emo reel’ threatens to beat Pratman, not just in terms of numbers, which is bad enough, but juicy deals, which is worse.

What’s destroying our body, messing our mind and annihilating our soul with its sweeping abundance and unshakeable addiction by just being a click or command away? Director Amit Golani’s Logout, penned by The Viral Fever collaborator Biswapati Sarkar, attempts to find out in a digital-day drama sprinkled with reality check, social relevance and technological caution. There’s an obvious Black Mirror quality about these investigations as its creator Charlie Booker regretfully noted in a Guardian column as far back as 2011, ‘It’s hard to think of a single human function that technology hasn’t somehow altered, apart perhaps from burping. That’s pretty much all we have left.’ Truly, every single day, machines take over man as possibilities are abused for short-sighted gains and cheap thrills.

To promote his film Logout, a cautionary tale about smartphone addiction and the perils of online fame, Babil Khan turned to Instagram, posting a ‘cryptic post’ before deleting it—an all-too-common marketing ploy. It’s one of the self-defeating ironies of the genre. Bollywood—and streaming platforms—are in no position to preach. They depend as much on social media as the nervy, shut-in influencers they depict. They bait, patronise and actively profiteer from the same economy. And like everyone else, they collect data. Directed by Amit Golani and written by Biswapati Sarkar, Logout is best approached as a campy thriller than a revelatory tech satire. Pratyush (Babil) is a young content creator living by himself in a big city. He’s amassed substantial clout making silly sketches on YouTube, viral trash where he assumes both the male and female roles, like an actor in the early days of silent film. He’s close to clocking 10 million followers—a major brand deal hinges on this milestone—but he wouldn’t stoop to any level, or so he thinks. His competitors are the real bottom-feeders. Literally: sliding down their boxers and twerking before the camera for hits.

Losing a phone is an inconvenience for most, a nightmare for many. For Pratyush Dua, it becomes a question of life and death. Pratyush aka ‘Pratman’ is an influencer — the kind that have swarmed around us in the oft-repeated dime a dozen manner — whose life in the Internet bubble is solely based on getting to 10 million followers on Instagram faster than his immediate rival. For that, Pratman is willing to do all it takes, with everything about his persona, including his jarring ringtone screaming ‘Notice Me’. Until one day when his phone stops ringing. Stolen by someone who claims to be his biggest fan, Pratyush — played by Babil Khan in Logout, now streaming on Zee5 — not only faces the usual comes-with-the-territory misdemeanours of identity theft, digital arrest, data leak and so on, he also finds himself quickly losing control over a ‘world’ he thought he had complete power in.