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.
In spirit, Logout is similar to CTRL, the Ananya Panday film on Netflix, that dropped a few months ago. Like that film, Logout is a cautionary tale about the AI times we live in, where nothing is private anymore. But Logout, a hat tip to Black Mirror in tone and texture, hits home a lot harder because you realise that you don’t really need to be an influencer with a few million followers to be susceptible to what the film’s protagonist is subjected to. In an era where we autofill random sites with our personal information, tick boxes without reading a word and have the worldwide web privy to every statistic that defines us, Logout is a chilling reminder that we are perhaps just one click away from losing it all.
That’s what happens with Pratyush. Estranged from his family, Pratyush is a completely different persona as Pratman. Fevikwik-ed to his phone — his older sister — (Rasika Dugal in a cameo) can barely get a word in when they meet after months, Pratyush is perhaps a slightly more exaggerated version of most of us. Until an obsessive fan tears his world apart, threatening to blow up the image that he has painstakingly built over the years.
Director Amit Golani and writer Biswapati Sarkar have more than a finger on the pulse of today’s youth (and those even of a slightly older demographic) to show how we all are enslaved by our ‘cell’ phones. Logout, with Babil leading this one-man show and showing occasional flashes of his father, Irrfan, is timely and relevant. The penultimate moments of the film are largely reduced to an unnecessary masala mish-mash, but overall, this is a film that demands to be watched.
