Stolen movie review: Abhishek Banerjee's thriller isn'y as impactful as it wants to be
Stolen is a thought-provoking film about two brothers, Gautam and Raman, who are forced to confront their privilege and prejudices when a baby is kidnapped. The movie raises important themes of societal injustice and redemption, but lacks urgency and character development. It is a timely and gripping story that highlights the harsh reality of societal inequalities.
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Hindustan Times
4 hours ago
- Hindustan Times
‘Stolen' chances: Deepanjana Pal writes on a gritty film's scramble for space
Before making his first feature film, Stolen (2023), director Karan Tejpal worked as assistant director on Delhi-6 (2009) and was part of the directorial team on three Rajkumar Hirani projects: Lage Raho Munna Bhai (2006), 3 Idiots (2009) and Ferrari ki Sawaari (2012). This might suggest that Tejpal leans towards the blockbuster aesthetic. Yet Stolen has neither the candy-floss escapism of popular cinema nor any of its glossy artifice. The film is rooted in reality, its plot inspired by news reports of violent crimes committed by mobs reacting to WhatsApp forwards. It has all the best qualities of a small film: the only thing tighter than its script is its budget, and it teems with insight and talent. In the movie, the Bansal brothers, Gautam (Abhishek Banerjee) and Raman (Shubham), get entangled in a missing-infant case after an impoverished woman named Jhumpa (Mia Maelzer) accuses Raman of stealing her baby. Raman is quickly cleared of suspicion, but when he sees how lazily the police are investigating, he decides to help Jhumpa, much to Gautam's annoyance. Gautam, with his cynical conviction that money can solve everything, offers one view of the privileged Indian. Raman, with his empathy and courage, offers another. Between them is Jhumpa, whose poverty leaves her teetering between being invisible and being demonised. Stolen moves at breakneck pace, with twists in its tale and tense chases through the Rajasthan countryside. Woven into the thriller is a layered portrait of privilege, class divides and mob mentality. The film is not interested in occupying a moral high ground. Instead, it focuses on subtlety and complexity. The village whose men form a murderous mob is also home to kind-hearted boys (or are they just a few years away from being sucked into a hivemind of violence?). The ambulance driver who saves lives also trades in them. Raman's empathy for a heartbroken stranger runs parallel to his disregard for his own mother. Despite being selected for the Venice Film Festival in 2023, Stolen has had no theatrical release, and has only just found space on a streaming platform. That it has taken this long is worrying, especially since the movie was championed by influential filmmakers such as Anurag Kashyap, Nikkhil Advani and Kiran Rao. Discussions about the health of the movie industry invariably turn to earnings, but a vibrant entertainment business is more than the sum of its blockbusters. Small projects such as Stolen are an integral aspect of building a stable industry. They offer the audience much-needed variety and showcase talent that doesn't fit the cookie-cutter moulds of commercial cinema. Take Maelzer, who delivers an extraordinary performance as Jhumpa. 'I generally don't get a lot of commercial auditions because of the way I look,' she has said. An alumnus of the National School of Drama, she has worked as an acting coach and a Pilates instructor, to afford the luxury of doing only projects that excite her; projects like Majid Majidi's Beyond the Clouds (2017), and Stolen. Medium- and low-budget films allow creatives the freedom to experiment with and explore their craft too. Some go on to win awards and critical acclaim. But even without such shiny validation, small films enrich the industry because they alleviate the sense of sameness that otherwise pervades theatrical offerings. What will it take to admit this, and act on it? In a recent interview, actor Seema Pahwa, who made her directorial debut with the small-budget satire Ramprasad ki Tehrvi (2019), said raising money for another film felt impossible because producers were not interested in more of the unconventional. 'If you make good low-budget films, at least two out of five will work. But they (producers) only want the same old formula that people are rejecting.' As pronouncements go, that's more depressing than the plots of most non-mainstream movies. After all, as dark as Stolen might be, at least in a way it holds out hope. (To reach Deepanjana Pal with feedback, write to @dpanjana on Instagram)
India Today
5 hours ago
- India Today
Two more Naxals gunned down by security forces in Chhattisgarh, four killed so far
Security forces on Saturday gunned down two more Naxals during an ongoing anti-Naxal operation in the dense forest region of the National Park area in Bijapur district. With these fresh encounters, the total number of Naxals eliminated over the past three days has risen to four, including two high-ranking Maoist operation, which began earlier this week, has led to the deaths of top Naxal leader, who was Central Committee member, Sudhakar alias Gautam, carrying a bounty of Rs 1 crore, and Bhaskar Rao alias Mailarapu Adellu, who had a combined bounty of Rs 45 lakh across Telangana and was the Secretary of the Mancherial-Komarambheem (MKB) division of the CPI (Maoist) Telangana State Committee and also a member of its Special Zonal Committee. On Friday, security personnel recovered Bhaskar's body along with an AK-47 rifle, explosives and other arms. Earlier, on the first day of the operation, Sudhakar was killed and an automatic rifle was seized from the encounter continued through the night into Saturday, with security forces recovering additional automatic weapons from the latest gunfight. The large-scale operation remains active as forces continue combing the forested terrain in pursuit of remaining Watch IN THIS STORY#Chhattisgarh
Indian Express
8 hours ago
- Indian Express
Stolen: The rare Hindi movie that isn't afraid to insult its own audience, and you know what, we deserve it
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. Also read – Amar Singh Chamkila: Imtiaz Ali set out to make a movie about the slain singer, but he made a movie about himself instead Had the brothers not been there, the police would've probably pinned the entire thing on the poor woman, Jhumpa. Raman knows this, and he understands that if there was ever a time to weaponise his upper-caste privilege, it's this. He pushes the police to investigate, while a dumbstruck Gautam — he's the kind of person who probably owns a 'theka' in Gurugram as a side hustle — reminds him that they have somewhere to be. In India, a person could be dying on the side of the street and no one would step forward to help. Jhumpa represents Indians on the fringes of society, the sort of people whose plight is rarely covered on the news. They say that the media is biased, and that the mistreatment of minorities often goes unreported. But have they wondered how to present this news to someone who'd rather watch Bigg Boss instead? For about an hour, Stolen is an accurate representation of why most Indians avoid sticking their nose in other people's troubles. Many of them are selfish; some, proudly so. A regular day is filled with so many unnecessary stresses that the mere idea of inviting further inconvenience is repulsive. Our empathy is systematically obliterated over the course of our lives. We're hypocritical people who brag about respecting women, but we never miss a chance to blame them for their misfortune. We're proud to belong to the land of atithi devo bhava, but we ignore the harassment of foreign tourists. How many of us would jump in to save one of them from being scammed by an auto guy? How many of us would warn them to not attend Holi parties? Raman probably would, which is why he insists on accompanying the woman and making sure that the cops find her baby. Sometimes, he tells his obnoxious brother, it's important to stand up for what is right. One thing leads to another, and the brothers are thrown headfirst into the plot of NH10 — the Anushka Sharma movie from a decade ago that addressed many of the same themes. Stolen could've very easily had a scene in which someone, probably one of the cops, explains to Gautam and Raman why people like Jhumpa are destined to be downtrodden. Director Karan Tejpal could've altered his script to include a line like 'mhari chhoriya chhoro se kam hai ke' and probably have been rewarded with a star of Aamir Khan's stature signing on. But Stolen, first and foremost, is a genre film. The 'message' it wants to deliver is incidental to the plot. It's one thing to weave the social fabric of a country into a film's narrative, but it's a different thing altogether to weave a narrative around a moral lesson. Far too often, our movies fail to understand this distinction. Dunki doesn't bother to investigate the hopelessness that's compelling Punjab's youth to take the most dangerous route out of India. 12th Fail isn't interested in exposing an education system that leaves millions with no choice but to devote the prime of their lives to a pipe dream. Every aspiring actor looks up to Shah Rukh Khan; nobody talks about the millions that return to their small towns with shattered dreams. Read more – Paradise: Darshana Rajendran's thrilling Malayalam gem exposes the micro-aggressions of toxic men But do people like Jhumpa even have the option of returning? Or will they perpetually have to be on the run, glancing over their shoulder? It is a travesty that Stolen isn't told from her perspective. Mia Maelzer is terrific in the role. In fact, the movie unfolds from the point-of-view of the least interesting character, and, as good as Banerjee is as Gautam, he'd be the first to admit that he's sort of miscast. It's sort of like a Nawazuddin Siddiqui-Afwaah situation. Like that Sudhir Mishra film, Stolen's ultimate aim is to invite introspection. It is up to us to decide what is worse; that Gautam is an embodiment of the Savarna saviour trope, or if he is meant to be a surrogate for us. There's a reason why Hindi cinema is becoming increasingly two-dimensional. To provoke thought, our films (and filmmakers) will first have to reconcile with the idea of being criticised. Forget indicting the audience, Hindi movies will champion unspeakable immorality — they will mistreat minorities, spite the silenced, incite the incels — only to please us. How can they be expected to raise a mirror to society? It would be like a politician pointing fingers at their vote bank. Stolen, however, has no qualms in questioning the sort of pepole who turn a blind eye to the exploitation around them. If you're going to annoy someone, it might as well be the apathetic, the fence-sitters, the social climbers. Post Credits Scene is a column in which we dissect new releases every week, with particular focus on context, craft, and characters. Because there's always something to fixate about once the dust has settled. Rohan Naahar is an assistant editor at Indian Express online. He covers pop-culture across formats and mediums. He is a 'Rotten Tomatoes-approved' critic and a member of the Film Critics Guild of India. He previously worked with the Hindustan Times, where he wrote hundreds of film and television reviews, produced videos, and interviewed the biggest names in Indian and international cinema. At the Express, he writes a column titled Post Credits Scene, and has hosted a podcast called Movie Police. You can find him on X at @RohanNaahar, and write to him at He is also on LinkedIn and Instagram. ... Read More
