Stolen: A Breathless Survival Thriller Headlined By A Spectacular Abhishek Banerjee

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.

A baby gets stolen at a railway station. The mother wakes up minutes later with a howl. She aimlessly runs only to halt near another passenger. He has her baby’s cap. She leaps at him, but he denies involvement, having only seen the baby being taken away by another woman. Why didn’t he stop? He didn’t know. Amidst this, the cops arrive, and so does the young man’s brother. They have a function at home, but something stops Ramesh Bansal (Shubham Vardhan), the inadvertent eyewitness, from abandoning the woman even when Gautam (Abhishek Banerjee), his sibling, opposes. Someone has to help her, and if not him, then who?

Stolen, a breathlessly lean thriller, is about two urbane men caught in the plight of a tribal woman. If the premise implies a saviour story, then the film resists the trappings. Jhuma (Mia Maelzer)'s four-month-old daughter is missing, and her misery feels primal. She breaks down like a sack of bags and tells someone over the phone that she will really die. Ramesh, willingly, and Gautam, unwillingly, get involved in this, but the search for the baby transmutes into a journey from hell as videos from the station, circulating on social media, falsely imply that the men are the kidnappers. This makes them indiscriminately vulnerable, and the problem at hand multiplies.

Despite the segue, Stolen never loses sight of Jhuma and her missing baby. Every time her search or grief is interrupted by something extraneous (Ramesh is fatally shot and Gautam is attacked), Tejpal uses the intrusions to mimic the fate of such incidents, where tragedies of minorities are supplanted by palatable tales of heroism.

This self-awareness leaks into the characters as well. Ramesh and Gautam have disparate attitudes towards helping Jhuma, and while both are privileged and neither is outrightly evil, their responses underline the dubious sympathy that liberals harbour towards the disenfranchised, tottering as it is always on suspicion. Unfolding at a neck-breaking speed, Stolen eschews exposition for details that go a long way. For instance, Ramesh’s empathy is informed by his profession. During a police investigation, he says that he is a photographer, a disclosure that contextualises his idealism and crippling compassion towards Jhuma. Being privy to sordid realities more than others, Ramesh perhaps looks at helping Jhuma as his only chance of doing something more than documenting hardships.

Similarly, Gautam is a gold-chain-wearing businessman who uses money as a language. In his SUV-riding world, people like Jhuma stand no chance of orbiting, let alone entering. Their faces get obliterated by the tinted glasses of his car. Yet, he is liberal in his own way. The function at his house is the wedding of his mother — a piece of information that makes the cops crack up, but not him.

Shot by Isshaan Ghosh and Sachin S. Pillai, Stolen gets bleaker by the minute. As the narrative hits the road, the looming sense of disaster in the air creeps into the frames. Ghosh and Pillai go for one long take after another, none showy but each imbued with the crisis of uncertainty. The craft is immersive, much like the performances. Mia Maelzer is terrific as a mother who cares for nothing and no one except her missing child. Her eyes convey a world of emotions. Equally impressive is Vardhan as the man with a bleeding heart. It is Banerjee, however, who gets the more fulfilling arc. Coming off from tentpole films like Stree 2, this feels like a brave new world for him, but the actor melds with the setting like he always existed in it. As Gautam, Banerjee delivers a daringly physical performance that ranges from distrust to disbelief within seconds.

Here are some of Abhishek Banerjee's outstanding performances, available to stream on OTTplay Premium.

Stolen begins with the stealing of a child, but as the film unravels, the title assumes multiple meanings. Tejpal conjures a porous desolation that alludes to numerous realities, like what happens when the shield of privilege is stolen? What happens when the sanity of a crowd is stolen? What happens when those, destined to be stolen from all their lives, decide to steal their fate for once? Stolen provides no answers but comes closest to offering a response by raising the right questions.

Stolen is currently streaming on Prime Video.