Stolen Review: Abhishek Banerjee-Shubham Vardhan's Gripping Thriller Is A Punch To The Gut
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Stolen movie review: Karan Tejpal's Stolen feels like a gut punch. A 90-odd minute thriller that grips you from the first frame and doesn't let go.
Karan Tejpal's Stolen feels like a gut punch. A 90-odd minute thriller that grips you from the first frame and doesn't let go, it's one of those rare stories that feels both cinematically stylised and terrifyingly real. Beneath the pulse-pounding chases and moments of moral tension lies something darker and more inescapable: the feeling that this could happen to anyone, anywhere in India, and there would be no way out.
The plot is deceptively simple. Two brothers—Gautam (Abhishek Banerjee) and Raman (Shubham Vardhan)—are headed to their mother's wedding. But a chance encounter at a railway station with a poor labourer named Jhumpa (Mia Maelzer), whose baby has just been kidnapped, derails their lives. What starts as a misunderstanding spirals into a nightmarish descent through suspicion, bureaucratic apathy and mob hysteria.
The railway station setting is not incidental. It is a liminal space—where classes, castes and lives collide. Tejpal uses it to stunning effect, invoking the chaos of India's margins where nothing is safe, not even reality. Here, a missing child isn't just a tragedy; it's a catalyst for exposing every rotten seam of our collective social fabric — police inefficiency, misinformation, class prejudice and the rage of a public always on the verge of exploding.
And explode it does. The mob attack scene is an absolute masterclass. Shot from inside a car, it's claustrophobic, tense and feels sickeningly familiar. We've all seen these videos—on WhatsApp, on TV or online. But Stolen doesn't let you swipe away. It makes you sit inside that car, frozen, watching panic set in.
The chase scenes that follow are breathless. Not just for their scale — vehicles tearing across dusty roads and mobs wielding sticks and guns — but for how closely they hug reality. There's no superheroism here. Just survival. Barely. The choreography is brilliant not because it's flashy, but because it's raw. It's immersive cinema at its most unforgiving.
Driving all of this forward are the lead performances. Shubham Vardhan's Raman, in a heart-stopping moment, fights to stay conscious after being shot. But it's Abhishek Banerjee who delivers the film's most searing moments. In a lynching scene that is almost unbearable to watch, the Stree actor channels helplessness, fear and the dawning realisation of privilege lost.
Mia Maelzer, as Jhumpa, is equally good. Her character is never a prop for sympathy — she is the very engine of the narrative, forcing the brothers (and us) to confront everything we don't want to admit about our society.
Yes, the ending softens a few blows. Maybe it needed to. Because the rest of Stolen is so stark, so hopeless in parts, that even a flicker of redemption feels like a small mercy. But the film never becomes dishonest. Even its hope is measured.
Stolen is about many things — class, bias and the dark society — but above all, it's about the violence that lies just beneath the surface of our everyday lives. It's not a film you simply watch. You survive it. And perhaps, that's the point. Because in India, when the two nations within us collide, survival isn't guaranteed.
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India.com
7 hours ago
- India.com
This 1 hour 33 minutes thriller is a major hit with 7.3 IMDb rating, has won 6 awards, became number 1 trending in 24 hours of OTT release, the film is.., the lead actors are…
This 1 hour 33 minutes thriller is a major hit with 7.3 IMDb rating, has won 6 awards, became number 1 trending in 24 hours of OTT release, the film is.., the lead actors are... Are you also a thriller film enthusiast who loves some unexpected twists and turns that can catch you off guard and keep you glued to your seat, but don't have anything that can excite you like that? Then you have come to the right place. Today, we will be telling you about a film that will not keep you hooked, but it also showcases a strong message that stays long after the credits roll. Winning the hearts of many across the world, this 1-hour 33-minute film has won many awards across the world. The film we are talking about is none other than Stolen. Directed by Karan Tejpal, the film features strong performers like Abhishek Banerjee, Mia, Harish Khanna, and Shubham. in the lead. The plot of the film begins with a small child who goes missing at a railway station, and the blame for it falls on Abhishek Banerjee's character and his brother, but what happens later makes the movie quite suspenseful. In a turn of events, a video of the missing kid with Abhishek Banejee and his brother goes viral. What happens next is a tale full of unexpected twists and truth, raising questions on what's true and what's not. The film speaks about an important message of how social media can be misused, and a single post can impact the entire life of a person. The deep and layered storyline will keep you intrigued throughout, but eventually will also leave a strong message. Streaming on Amazon Prime since 4 June, this movie has also secured the number 1 spot within 24 hours. It currently holds an IMDb rating of 7.3. Before its digital release, Stolen premiered at the 2023 Venice Film Festival and received global praise. It also bagged many awards like Best Director, Best Cinematography, and Best Actress at the Beijing International Film Festival. It was also awarded at Japan's Skip City International D-Cinema Festival and was specially honoured at the Zurich Film Festival. Back home in India, the film was screened at Jio MAMI Mumbai and the 28th International Kerala Film Festival
Indian Express
8 hours ago
- Indian Express
Abhishek Banerjee's Stolen is a self-reflective thriller that strips the urban saviour trope down to its vanities
Exactly midway through Karan Tejpal's Stolen, in the heat of a car chase, the film begins to look inwards. Raman (Shubham Vardhan), gripped by suspicion, turns to Jhumpa (Mia Maelzer), the tribal woman sitting behind him, and begins to question not only her truth, but his own assumptions. Doubt creeps in. He accuses her of lying, of using him, of twisting his privilege to her ends. It is at this moment that the film shifts gears. The road movie tightens into a chase film. The tone hardens: metal, dust, fury, evoking something like a Mad Max. But above all, something subtler emerges. A sort of self-awareness that wasn't there before. The film begins to watch itself, to interrogate the hands that made it. Here, the story folds back on the liberal gaze. The one that rushes to save, to empathise, but recoils the moment its moral certainty is threatened. It is here the film stops pretending to be a thriller. It becomes a mirror. After all, for Raman, Jhumpa was not a person, she was his possibility of being brave. She was his chance to matter. Not because of who she was, but because of what she allowed him to become in his own eyes, a witness, a saviour, a man finally standing for something real. So it's no accident that, at least for the first forty minutes, Raman carries himself with the quiet pride of a man convinced he is doing the right thing. It's no accident that he bears the name Raman, echoing Lord Rama, the archetype of moral clarity, the noble protector. And it's no accident, either, that the film conspires, in those same forty minutes, to cast him in that light. The narrative flatters him. It flatters us, too, drawing us into his delusion that this is his film. That Jhumpa exists solely to redeem him. And not just Raman, but Gautam (Abhishek Banerjee) too, his elder brother, adrift, who, through Jhumpa, will supposedly find his spine, his voice, his manhood. Because just look at how the film begins: an image of Jhumpa asleep on a railway platform, her daughter curled beside her. You think, for a moment, that this will be her story, a story of motherhood, of marginalization, of the fight for survival. And it is all of that, but not before two outsiders, two men, intrude. They barge not just into the railway station but into the narrative itself, quietly stealing it from her. Her child is taken. At first, she suspects that Raman is responsible. But soon, all three of them realise the truth: someone else is behind the disappearance. Gautam, who is just as privileged as Raman, but more 'practical' wants nothing to do with it. He simply wants to keep the world's suffering at arm's length. Raman, on the other hand, sees in this crisis a moral opportunity. Gautam urges him again and again to not get involved. But Raman is already involved, not just in Jhumpa's tragedy, but in his own need to be the righteous one. And so, what begins as the story of a mother from a marginalized community is gradually reshaped into a tale of two brothers in moral opposition, the righteous versus the practical, the idealist versus the cynic. The woman whose pain launched the story becomes the terrain over which two men perform their identities. Also Read | Stolen movie review: Abhishek Banerjee's thriller is narrow, and not as impactful as it wants to be In fact, as the film goes deeper, Jhumpa's story becomes the battleground on which men violently stake their claim on what they believe is just. Tejpal seizes this moment to probe the aimless rage that simmers beneath the surface, the sharp edge of intolerance, the thirst for vengeance, the corrosive grip of falsehoods that choke the nation. All of this resonates. It strikes a nerve. But soon, the cracks in the narrative begin to show. You start to sense the design. You begin to realise that, eventually, this is going to become yet another story of the urban saviour. You begin to suspect the story will not return to Jhumpa. You begin to sense the film's limits, accepting it might resemble a NH10 but will never reach the heights of its more evolved politics. And here, at the film's midpoint, the veil lifts. You begin to see that all along, you've been caught in Tejpal's carefully laid trap. The design was the deception. The story, it turns out, was always hers. But was overshadowed by Gautam's hard pragmatism and Raman's desperate idealism. She said it more than once that she would find her daughter on her own. But no one listened. We waited for the men to act, to fix, to carry the weight. We expected the labour of salvation to fall to them. So it is no surprise that, in the film's most brutal reversal, the saviours become the hunted. The mob descends, and suddenly Raman and Gautam are cast in the role they never imagined for themselves: the outsider, the intruder, the threat. No wonder, much earlier in the film, they are told by a cop, Panditji (Harish Khanna), 'No mercy for outsiders here.' Because in the eyes of that furious crowd, the mob is not monstrous. They, too, believe they are right. They, too, see themselves as saviours. And this is where the film turns its gaze on the conceit of liberal righteousness: the kind that treats marginalisation not as lived reality but as an aesthetic, as a metaphor, as a narrative terrain. It indicts the impulse to convert another's suffering into one's own moral reckoning. No wonder, then, that it is only in the film's closing minutes that Jhumpa is allowed to speak and narrate her story. Because by then, she has fought against every force that tried to strip it from her: patriarchy, caste, class, the camera, the script. She has endured not just grief but erasure and refused to vanish. So, in that sense, the title acquires multiple meanings. At first glance, it is about a nation being stripped of hope. But more profoundly, it is about the cinema of that very nation — a great stealer in its own right. It rewrites, it robs, it appropriates. It is complicit and, perhaps most strikingly, it refuses to even acknowledge the theft.
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First Post
10 hours ago
- First Post
Abhishek Banerjee on 'Stolen': 'It's not a dark film, it's really entertaining, an action-packed thriller'
In an exclusive interview with Firstpost, the actor spoke about his prep, the world he was thrown into, and exploring the different shades of his personalities with the choices he is making. read more In the new film Stolen that's streaming on Prime Video, Abhishek Banerjee plays a callous brother who wishes to stay away from an issue that has cropped up as an infant has gone missing. He has no idea he will soon be sucked into a never-ending rigmarole that shall have a deep and traumatic impact on his being. In an exclusive interview with Firstpost, the actor spoke about his prep, the world he was thrown into, and exploring the different shades of his personalities with the choices he is making. STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD Edited excerpts from the interview The film looks really intense. What was the prep like for you as an actor? The film has been made with a lot sweat, blood, and guts. I know it's fake blood but you do end up getting hurt here and there. And of course you were sweating in Pushkar. And guts because they wanted us to do stuff we could have never imagined as actors. For car shots, I'm so used to using tubes and drone shots and everything. When they narrated the story to me, I was fully prepared that the action will be taken care of by the action guys. On the first day of shoot, they took us to a dune where I had to climb down with the car and I was freaked out. I was like they cannot expect me to do something like this. This is not professional. And they were like no this is going to be the way we are going to shoot it. And they showed me how to do it. And I realized there was no way out. I cannot logically debate with them on this. I really had to take the driver's seat in the film and it needed guts. I am not somebody who is very confident with driving. I had a small but a terrible accident. I had to use all my senses to do this film. No amount of preparation could have prepared me for what was about to come. Were you able to detach yourself from the anguish of your character after the shoot was over? This question keeps popping up if you were able to detach yourself. A professional actor does not have to detach. They will just know what they are doing. Your homework is all done. There is no attachment after the shoot is over. You are just doing your job. What's your take on the dark side of your personality that you are exploring with choices like Stolen, Vedaa, Paatal Lok, and Apurva? I don't know why people are trying to relate this to my other intense roles. This is absolutely nothing like what I have done before. Because it is the same face, I do not have much intensity to show again and again. Maybe because of the beard people were thinking it's closer to those dark roles. We were shooting at night so that's why maybe people are calling it a dark film. STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD It's an entertaining film. It's really entertaining. Paatal Lok is a slow burner of nine episodes. Apurva is a different world altogether. Vedaa is far away from dark. Dark reality of India? Yes. But far away from dark. Stolen is not a dark film. It's an action packed thriller. And that's exactly what you expect from the highways when something wrong happens.
