Diverse — and divisive — worlds collide in Stolen, a film, that powered by its messy core, rips apart the fault lines in society, exposing the ever-growing chasm of class and caste and illustrates how a certain sense of redoubtability has now become the domain of the privileged.
Horrific on many levels — though it doesn’t belong to the horror genre — Stolen is one of those films that you won’t be able to tear your eyes away from, immersive as it is in terms of its plot and players as well as in what seems like a narrative terrain that isn’t alien. That familiarity, unfortunately, stems from the fact that we hear and read about such stories every day — mob fury, kangaroo courts and a system that turns a blind eye and ear to the underprivileged. To sum it up, the lack of empathy is not unfamiliar in this country.
Director Karan Tejpal, in fact, takes the roots of his much-feted film — Stolen has created waves on the global festival circuit before dropping on Amazon Prime Video — from a 2018 case of two young men in Assam’s Karbi Anglong, who were wrongly accused of being child lifters and lynched by a mob, fed as it were by fake news in the form of a WhatsApp forward.
Tejpal and co-writers Gaurav Dhingra and Swapnil Salkar-Agadbumb place their film in an unnamed part of the Indian hinterland. Played by Mia Maelzar, Jhumpa, a working-class woman, wakes up in the dead of the night in the middle of a deserted railway platform to find that her five-month-old baby girl has been kidnapped. Her first suspect is Raman (Shubham), a freelance photographer, who having missed his flight, has just embarked from a train. His elder brother Gautam (Abhishek Banerjee) comes to pick him up, only to land in the middle of the chaos, with the cops (played by Harish Khanna and Sahidur Rahaman), deciding that Raman is now a witness and must accompany them in their search for the child. Mortified, Gautam tries to dissuade his brother, but Raman — clearly the more empathetic and sensitive of the two — is moved by Jhumpa’s plight and a system that is heavily stacked against her. Before long, Stolen becomes an action-packed road thriller with an unpredictable twist at every bend.
Blending potent socio-political commentary with the dynamic elements of an edgy thriller, even as it focuses on a sibling equation that is shimmering with unresolved rage, Stolen is driven by a series of pulsating moments that are both adrenaline-pumping as well as a call to conscience. Jhumpa in tow, the Bansal brothers — the well-heeled Gautam, accused by his brother of “thinking from his pocket and not his heart”, still wants to wriggle his way out, till a time comes when he can’t... and then won’t — find themselves facing an unending nightmare, from vigilante groups who are only out to kill, to an apathetic and corrupt system that makes sure that this is no country for women and for the underprivileged. Jhumpa is both.
Stolen doesn’t say anything that we aren’t sadly unaware of, but Tejpal — aided by a superlative bunch of actors — delivers a sucker-punch in almost every scene. The film hurtles along, as you do with it, challenging our perceptions of class and morality. And, most importantly, of humanity. One of the best films of the year so far.