‘Stolen' review: No good deed goes unpunished in this bleak, impressive thriller

Mint

3 days ago

Lynching is thought to have originated as a term sometime in the 1700s. The word conjures up an evil of the past, barbaric and unthinkable in a modern civilised society. It is, therefore, especially alarming that the term, and practice, has seen a resurgence in India over the past decade or so. This is tied to a related problem, the proliferation of fake news, willful and otherwise, through WhatsApp and other media. Just search for 'lynch mob' and 'WhatsApp'—most of the results are cases from India.
Only a handful of Hindi films have addressed the modern face of lynching. In Mukkabaaz (2018) and Afwaah (2023), vigilante groups attack a Dalit and a Muslim character respectively, who are badly injured but survive. No film has replicated the chilling aesthetic of lynching videos: self-shot on phones, victims begging for their lives, attackers addressing the camera. Dibakar Banerjee came closest with the shocking murder in the first segment of Love Sex Aur Dhokha (2010), a film where all the action is mediated via screens of different kinds.
Stolen doesn't imitate these videos, but it comes close to capturing their dread. In the opening scene of Karan Tejpal's film, a baby is stolen from its sleeping mother's side by an unseen figure on a railway platform. A few minutes later, we're told the film is inspired by 'real events'. In an interview to Scroll, Karan Tejpal said the inspiration was a lynching in Assam in 2018, where two people were killed by a mob on suspicion being child traffickers. This wasn't the only such incident around that time; there was a spate of lynchings in Jharkhand in 2017, when rumours spread on WhatsApp about child abductors resulted in the death of five people.
Gautam (Abhishek Banerjee) has come to pick up his younger brother, Raman (Shubham Vardan), from the railway station. He finds his sibling surrounded by a small, agitated group. Jhumpa (Mia Maelzer), a tribal woman, is accusing Raman, who'd picked up the abducted infant's cap, of stealing her baby. Two cops arrive and gruffly ask questions. Raman clearly isn't the abductor, but the young man is moved by the woman's frantic appeals. He pushes the policemen to do their job; the righteous indignation in his voice tells us he's in trouble before even he knows it. Sure enough, the brothers are forced to tag along on their investigation in the dead of night.
Unlike his brother, Gautam has no illusions. 'Bahut galat phase hain yaar (we're in real trouble),' he tells Raman. He immediately realises it's a situation they need to extricate themselves from, and tries to smooth-talk, then bribe the cops. If Raman is a bleeding heart liberal, Gautam stands for the practical, risk-averse upper-class Indian (he's introduced talking on the phone about afterparties). He shows no empathy for Jhumpa, not because he doesn't recognise her predicament but because she's of a class and caste whose problems he's either isolated from or can be made to vanish easily (when she asks for help, he offers her money).
Stolen has the same basic trajectory as NH10 (2015), a momentary loss of reason that plunges an urban couple into a hinterland nightmare. But where that film had a clear, sadistic villain, Tejpal, working with writers Gaurav Dhingra, Swapnil Salkar and Vardhan, doesn't offer this neat a contrast. The antagonists are either shadowy figures or faceless mobs. No one's what they seem: one of the cops, Panditji (a wonderful Harish Khanna), reveals himself by degrees to be a man of conscience as well. Jhumpa's story keeps mutating—I won't reveal more except to say the way some of the revelations are deployed reminded me of the brilliant Sonchiriya (2019), the only Hindi film in recent times that can match this one for utter bleakness.
The most interesting journey, though, is Gautam's, who proves more resourceful under pressure than one might think. The way his self-centredness evolves into a surge of human feeling doesn't feel contrived. This is in large part because of Banerjee's deftness. He's become, in short order, one of the most arresting performers in Hindi film. From the start, it's been difficult to pigeonhole him. His twin breakthroughs were as the slapstick Jana in Stree (2018) and the scary Langda Tyagi in the first season of Paatal Lok (2020). Last year, he reprised his role in Stree 2, and was also excellent as the smooth-talking, casteist politician who John Abraham goes up against in Vedaa (his gallery of villains also includes the grotesque child rapist in the 2017 indie Ajji). Stolen, for the first time, offers him a chance to do everything. He's caustically funny scolding his brother and Jhumpa, adrenaline-filled and panicked when they're being pursued (a handful of searing chases go a long way to enlivening the film's visual sameness), and stoically determined at the end, when he's been through too much to stand aside.
Karan Tejpal's film premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2023. The long wait for an India release must have been fraught—especially with Santosh (2024), another stark film about the tenuous hold of law and order in small towns, not making it past the censors this year. But Stolen is now streaming on Amazon Prime, having bypassed theatres. It's the kind of film that makes you feel some hope for Hindi cinema and none for the country.