CTRL Review | Vikramaditya Motwane’s Screenlife Thriller Is Smart and Effective

If you look at the characters Nella, the lead of CTRL, and Bella, the lead of Call Me Bae, the behavioral patterns of both these characters have a similarity. They are both very impulsive, and the social media validation is what they both live for. But the significantly different and good thing about the Vikramaditya Motwane-directed Netflix film is that the writing is not trying to mount the storytelling with the same thinking capacity of the main character. CTRL, the new Screenlife film starring Ananya Pandey, is a very nuanced thriller that doesn’t try to be escapist and, at the same time, shows you the future threats, which will have a flurry of AI assistance.

Nella Awasthi and Joe Mascarenhas are an influencer couple. But on the fifth anniversary of their channel NJoy, Nella decides to surprise Joe but ends up seeing him cheating on her with another girl. The video of this incident becomes viral and practically shatters the life of Nella. A new AI app named CTRL helps Nella by providing an AI assistant, Allen, who sort of guided her to rebrand herself in the social media space. Nella asks Allen to remove Joe from her social media footprint, and after a few days, Nella gets to know that Joe has been missing for some time. Nella’s efforts to find out what happened to Joe is what we see in CTRL.

Some of the things they show in the movie might become only real in a few more years’ time in real life. But the film’s writing by Avinash Sampath and Motwane captures all the tiny bits of the way the character will process things, making the seemingly futuristic idea look pretty plausible. There is one sequence in the film where Nella is trying to get into Joe’s particular email account, and for that, she has to use two different email accounts in order to reset the password. In many of these tech thrillers, they would conveniently skip certain practical hurdles in such events, but in CTRL, they were showing us every detail, making us feel like an onlooker. Even in the scene where Nella realizes what’s actually happening, she is not shown as a dumb person who doesn’t know how to react.

Screenlife thrillers are not something we see regularly. Searching by Aneesh Chaganty was a prominent film that made the genre very popular, and in India, we have seen Mahesh Narayanan’s CU Soon, which was shot and released during the pandemic. In the case of CTRL, Vikramaditya Motwane actually gets a bit more logical breathing space because his main characters are influencers. It sort of gives him space to insert cameras everywhere every time, and since video making is a big part of their lifestyle, the movie was even able to include songs with graphics. To be frank, the clean feel of the UI, which, by the way, doesn’t look artificial, is making us forget the Screenlife thriller facet of the movie.

It is actually the thriller aspect and the possibilities that are keeping us invested in the film. What was impressive about the story was that it isn’t trying to be an escapist revolution film, and the messaging is pretty indirect by just showing how things can take a bad turn in a matter of seconds. The already existing threats, like deep fake AI videos, AI voice, etc., become a part of the narrative at crucial points. And it is not like the entire social media in the movie are a bunch of idiots. When an evidently altered video gets published, there is a share of comments that call out the video as fake. The realness of the situations and how the movie stages those emotionally dangerous situations was so impressive that I thought someone like director Shankar, who has made customized social justice his default scripting theme, should watch this movie to get an updated perspective from this generation.

Ananya Pandey, in her second OTT outing in a span of a month, gets a better-written character in CTRL. Nella is not a caricature like Bella, and the extremely personal moments of the characters make her impulsiveness and vulnerabilities look a lot more real. Vihaan Samat, who played Bella’s ex-husband in Call Me Bae, gets to be Nella’s ex-boyfriend this time. And again, because of the better writing that has sensible dialogues from Sumukhi Suresh, the character and performance look more genuine. Aparshakti Khurana has given the voice to the AI character Allen.

CTRL as a story is not going after any sci-fi concept that feels alien to the audience. Rather than preaching to the viewers about the dangers of the overuse of a lot of free stuff, it just shows you the character’s journey. At the end of the film, we see the character in a space where she has to go back to something that ruined her peace, and thus, the story shows you the psychological traps that come with the comfort of technology.