Latest news with #Jhumpa
Time of India
08-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Time of India
Stolen ending explained: Was Champa really Jhumpa's daughter and what happened to Gautam?
Stolen ending explained: Since its recent release on Prime Video, Abhishek Banerjee's Stolen has been making waves, drawing praise from both audiences and critics. The film has stood out for its tense, gripping storyline, compelling characters, and standout performances most notably Banerjee's own intense portrayal. As the credits roll, viewers are left with lingering questions about the truth behind Champa's identity and what ultimately happened to Gautam. If you're looking for answers, we've broken down the film's thought-provoking ending for you. What is Stolen on Prime Video about? Stolen tells the story of a baby's abduction from a railway station, which leads to two innocent brothers being falsely accused of the crime. The movie is inspired by the tragic 2018 lynching of two men in Assam. With its gripping plot, well-etched characters, and hard-hitting themes, Stolen has been earning rave reviews from critics and viewers alike. (Spoilers ahead, you know what to do) Stolen ending explained Diving straight into the major plot points and climax, it's important to note that Gautam was initially against helping Jhumpa, while Raman was determined to go all out to find the baby. However, Gautam later realized the urgency of the situation especially after seeing his own brother in a critical condition. Was Champa actually Jhumpa's daughter? Yes, Champa was indeed Jhumpa's daughter in the sense that Jhumpa had given birth to her as an illegal surrogate for a wealthy woman. According to the contract, Jhumpa was supposed to give up one child, but the people involved tried to take away her other baby as well to sell her. That's why she kept insisting that Champa was her daughter. What happened to Gautam and Raman? In the movie, a tragic mob lynching occurs in which both Raman and Gautam are severely injured. Jhumpa and the brothers take shelter in an unknown place to help Raman rest, as he was bleeding heavily. Jhumpa goes out to search for her daughter, and after a while, Gautam also leaves, but this proves to be a bad decision because the mob finds him and brutally attacks him. Fortunately, the police arrive later and try to save Gautam by telling the mob that he did not steal the baby. Did Jhumpa finally find Champa? Gautam connects the dots and realizes that the ambulance driver at the hospital they were at is involved in Jhumpa's baby's kidnapping. He also does his best to find Achelaal, the man behind it all. Gautam discovers that another baby is being sold to some people and uncovers how deeply illegal surrogacy is rooted in that hospital. Jhumpa then arrives, recognizes the baby as Champa, holds her in her arms, and lets out a sigh of relief. Stolen cast and crew The film stars Abhishek Banerjee, Shubham Vardhan, Mia Maelzer, Harish Khanna, and Sahidur Rahman. It is directed by Karan Tejpal and produced by Anurag Kashyap, Kiran Rao, Nikkhil Advani, and Vikramaditya Motwane. Where to watch Abhishek Banerjee's Stolen? You can stream Stolen on Prime Video. For more news and updates from the world of OTT, and celebrities from Bollywood and Hollywood, keep reading Indiatimes Entertainment.
Hindustan Times
07-06-2025
- Entertainment
- 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)
The Wire
06-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Wire
‘Stolen' Embraces Contemporary India With All its Faults and Messiness
A still from 'Stolen'. Real journalism holds power accountable Since 2015, The Wire has done just that. But we can continue only with your support. Contribute Now Karan Tejpal's Stolen might look like a thriller on the surface. But if one pays attention, it reveals itself as a survival film. For the uninitiated, a survival film is a subgenre of films telling tales of a character surviving an adventure gone awry. In Stolen, the misadventure entails residing in India in the 2020s. A nation with obscene inequalities, a broken law-and-order system that couldn't be less bothered about the people who need it the most, and a culture that is a sinister concoction of ancient traditionalism and new-age apathy – India in the 2020s is a whole new beast. It's a place that has picked up the vocabulary of empathy, privilege and virtue-signalling from the West, but one where fans of a cricket team throng a stadium and remorselessly stomp over dozens of people – as a part of their 'celebration'. It's where parts of a country insist on organic vegetables and alkaline water, while in another, farmers kill themselves after being unable to procure water, or a fair price for their produce. It's a country where a routine police complaint or a witness statement can become a life-long trauma in a close-up, and seems like a dark comedy in a long shot. In this country, anyone who thinks they can imbibe a few bookish ideals and implement them in an ordinary day of small-town India, is being too naive. The closer one gets, the more India can seem like a labyrinth – with each corner springing a surprise. It's something Tejpal's film knows all too well. Hence, it doesn't claim to know how to 'solve' it – instead stressing on what one can do with their limited intent. Jhumpa (Mia Maelzer) is one of the countless people asleep on a bench of a platform in a nondescript railway station in Northern India (the dialect suggests Haryana). Next to her is her five-month old infant, Champa. In the film's first scene, a veiled woman – the only one awake on the platform — steals the infant and flees. While running, she bumps into a train passenger, Raman Bansal (Shubham Vardhan), who has gotten off a train to attend his mother's wedding. Raman's brother Gautam (Abhishek Banerjee) is asleep in the parking lot of the station, having driven there in the dead of the night to pick him up. When Jhumpa wakes up a few minutes later, and can't seem to find her infant daughter – all hell understandably breaks loose. She alleges Raman stole her child, who is holding a pink beanie, which fell from the baby when the thief bumped into him. A mob gathers around them, and like it happens in India's smartphone revolution, people start recording the confrontation. It takes Gautam to diffuse the rising tensions, when he asks a simple question to Jhumpa and the police constable nearby – 'Would a thief stick around at the crime scene, holding on to evidence that will implicate him?' Something Tejpal's film does exceedingly well is layer the exposition into throwaway lines of dialogue without drawing attention to themselves. In the first five minutes, it's established that Gautam and Raman have a Shashi Kapoor-Amitabh Bachchan dynamic from Deewar (1975). Gautam is the pragmatic business-owner, while Raman is the idealistic photographer. Raman is painted by Gautam as someone who indulges his bad mental health ('I don't understand this celebration of depression', he says), and feels things a little too strongly. On the other hand, Raman can't understand Gautam throwing money at all the problems he encounters, and someone so consumed with his sheltered life and his efforts to preserve it – that he couldn't be bothered about even the most mundane acts of kindness and consideration. A still from 'Stolen'. It's because of Raman that the two brothers get embroiled in the search for Jhumpa's infant. He knows what Jhumpa has already made her peace with – the cops will probably do something to save face, but it will be too late to find her daughter. Gautam can smell the stink of the situation from far away, because he's dealt with the twisted Indian law enforcement system more than Raman would know. He repeatedly tells him that this is a trap and they should walk away. Both Banerjee and Vardhan have appeared in minor roles before and are painfully on-point as the two brothers, with entirely different skill-sets. While Raman is the empathetic social media warrior, out of his depth while trying to do the right thing, Gautam knows how quickly idealism can curdle into a witch-hunt in the hands of less-than-competent investigators, working out of their many ideological, social biases. Also, Jhumpa is a tribal, making the cops that much more suspicious of anything she says. Not only is she poor, but she's also a woman. The slightest outburst as a result of her desperation and helplessness, means she gets labelled 'hysterical'. Maelzer plays Jhumpa like an open wound of a character, impossible to look away from. Tejpal's film embraces India with all its faults and messiness, realising the many conflicts between the different social orders, schizophrenic ideologies, and a society where truth takes many forms. It's an era where a growing number of people hold smartphones, without a hint of the wisdom to not get carried away by a WhatsApp forward and lynch people in broad daylight. The film delivers biting commentary on how these parts of India are 'consumed' from behind the safety of a screen. One of the film's most tense sequences is viewed from inside the car, almost making us voyeurs to a crime. How does one react — put away the phone and pretend like nothing happened, or introspect about what they just saw? A still from 'Stolen'. As Stolen teases us with the bleakest of ends, some things are contrived in the last 20 minutes to make the climax hopeful. Slightly put off by the contrivances at first, I think I understood the reason behind them much later. Even in the starkest tales, maybe it's the makers' responsibility to leave people with a 'moral' that emphasises on doing the right thing, with the knowledge that it's hard to do over a prolonged period. In India, if you aren't at the receiving end of the system, it's probably because of blind luck or privilege, or both. Tejpal's film wants to tell you that even if you can't go around rectifying an impoverished country battling an identity crisis, when injustice stares you in the face, don't look away. Despite what disenchanted voices will say, Karan Tejpal's film is a reminder that despite all the bad faith around us, it can't be an excuse to do nothing. *Stolen is streaming on Amazon Prime Video The Wire is now on WhatsApp. Follow our channel for sharp analysis and opinions on the latest developments.
Indian Express
06-06-2025
- Entertainment
- 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.
Time of India
05-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Time of India
Stolen real story explained: The true incident that inspired Abhishek Banerjee's film
Abhishek Banerjee's film Stolen was recently released on Prime Video and is receiving great reviews online. People are praising both the story and the performances. By the way, did you know that Stolen is actually inspired by a true story? Here's everything you need to know about Abhishek Banerjee's film Stolen and the horrifying real-life incident that inspired it. Abhishek Banerjee's film Stolen real story Inspired by the 2018 lynching of two men in Assam who were falsely accused of being child traffickers, Stolen derives its chilling urgency from the terror of real-life events. Reports state that Nilotpal Das and Abhijit Nath were travelling through Assam's Karbi Anglong district when tragedy struck. Around that time, a viral WhatsApp rumour had spread fear among villagers, warning them about suspected child kidnappers in the region. Misled by this false information, the villagers suspected the two men and brutally lynched them. According to Prime Video, the film begins with a heartbreaking incident: a baby is snatched from her mother Jhumpa's arms played by Mia Maelzer while she sleeps at a deserted railway station. What follows is a tense and relentless pursuit, as brothers Raman and Gautam played by Shubham Vardhan and Abhishek Banerjee team up with Jhumpa to search for the missing child. Set deep in India's remote hinterlands, their journey becomes increasingly perilous as hostile locals threaten their lives, turning the search into a desperate struggle for survival. Stolen cast and crew Stolen marks the powerful directorial debut of Karan Tejpal, who co-wrote the film with Gaurav Dhingra and Swapnil Salkar . Backed by executive producers Anurag Kashyap, Kiran Rao, Nikkhil Advani, and Vikramaditya Motwane, the film is produced by Gaurav Dhingra under the Jungle Book Studio banner. The cast features Abhishek Banerjee, Harish Khanna, Mia Maelzer, Sahidur Rahaman, and Shubham Vardhan in key roles.
