Stolen

Stolen is a rare film in Hindi cinema that maintains a clear focus on its central issue and is executed with precision. There is no unnecessary meandering, nor are there any subplots that detract from the main narrative – this is a meaty film.

Directed by Karan Tejpal, Stolen isn’t your usual film that sets out to tell the story of based on true events. But it follows the events as they unfold and upends the life of two brothers. On their way to their mother’s wedding, the two estranged brother begin a journey willingly and unwillingly to find a women’s stolen kid. On this journey they end up finding themselves, a bit of humanity and their love for each other. Abhishek Banerjee played by Gautam Bansal, is asked to pick up his depressed younger brother Raman (played by Shubham Vardhan) from the train station. However, the delayed train makes matters worse when Raman gets off the train right as Champa, a few months old girl is stolen off the platform. The mother Jhumpa played by Mia Maelzer finds him with her daughter’s beanie, accusing him of stealing her. It leads to more chaos between the two brothers, a group of cops and the mother.

Karan Tejpal’s Stolen might look like a thriller on the surface. But if one pays attention, it reveals itself as a survival film. For the uninitiated, a survival film is a subgenre of films telling tales of a character surviving an adventure gone awry. In Stolen, the misadventure entails residing in India in the 2020s. A nation with obscene inequalities, a broken law-and-order system that couldn’t be less bothered about the people who need it the most, and a culture that is a sinister concoction of ancient traditionalism and new-age apathy – India in the 2020s is a whole new beast. It’s a place that has picked up the vocabulary of empathy, privilege and virtue-signalling from the West, but one where fans of a cricket team throng a stadium and remorselessly stomp over dozens of people – as a part of their ‘celebration’.

A lot about Karan Tejpal’s Stolen is vague. The landscape looks familiar, but no names are given, and an angry mob keeps gathering steam, but their rooted investment is unclear. A woman claims to be pregnant without a man involved, and a deserted mansion is deemed cursed without a direct reason. Such obscurity feels deliberate. Stolen is as specific as encompassing, as much a story as a statement. The survival thriller is about people and society. There is little novelty about the overlap, but Tejpal’s film, breathless in its pace, straddles the many worlds of its creation with distinct urgency. It manages to hold our gaze close to certain faces while churning the fear of the unknown. The result is a rare film about class that unfolds with its ear close to the ground. One that resists making empty statements by checking its privilege as part of the critique. In that sense, Stolen is eerily reminiscent of Navdeep Singh’s NH10 (2015), a slasher thriller that contained multitudes of horror in its proposition: what happens when the urban enters the lawless rural jungle? What happens when a part of India collides with another? Written by Swapnil Salkar, Gaurav Dhingra and Tejpal, Stolen asks the same questions and keeps addressing them during its runtime.

In an industry dominated by vanity projects, nepo nonsense, and state-sponsored propaganda, nothing is more annoying than a film that aims to impart a ‘message’ to the audience. As with everything else in Hindi cinema, this message is typically delivered at such a volume that Sonu Nigam might take offence. Laxman Utekar’s Mimi concludes not with climactic catharsis, but with a chunk of statistics about adoption. How cinematic. The horror film Chhori, on the other hand, ends with data points about female infanticide. Neither film had enough faith in the audience to know, without being told, that killing babies (or abandoning them) is wrong. It was quite refreshing to discover that the new Amazon Prime Video film Stolen, despite being a ‘message’ movie itself, chooses to let the plot and characters do the talking instead of literal text. Directed by Karan Tejpal, Stolen’s true agenda — and there is an agenda, make no mistake — reveals itself only at the end. This revelation is smartly timed to coincide with the redemption of a truly terrible character, played by Abhishek Banerjee. His name is Gautam, and we first meet him as he’s waiting outside a small-ish railway station for his younger brother, Raman. It’s nighttime, and there’s a wedding in the family the next day. They’re already late because Raman missed his flight and had to take a train instead. At the station, he witnesses a tribal woman’s infant being kidnapped, and moments later, finds himself ensnared in the mess. Gautam’s instinct is to mind his own business and get on with his life, but something — it could be guilt, it could be trauma, or it could just be basic decency — compels Raman to get involved.