Who or what is stolen in Karan Tejpal's Stolen? Well, for starters, a woman secretly grabs someone's baby and runs. The victim turns out to be Jhumpa (Mia Maelzer), who is determined to find her child. However, it soon becomes clear that without Raman's (Shubham Vardhan) support, the police would have done nothing. Raman is the younger brother of Gautam (Abhishek Banerjee), and we eventually learn that something, in the past, was also stolen from him. Like Jhumpa, Raman lost someone close to him, but unlike Jhumpa, Raman moves in the upper-middle-class circles of society. Within this hierarchical structure, the police officers are at the top (there is an established ranking system within the police), and when you look at some of them in this film, you realize that something great — something profoundly deep — has been stolen from within their very bodies. The same thing is missing from the Forest Officials and the mob that runs after Jhumpa, Raman, and Gautam with blood in their eyes. I am talking about intelligence and empathy. The police ask inane questions, such as what Raman and Gautam were doing at the railway station and what the former does professionally. The ego of these police officers is hurt when Raman asks them to do their job properly. Then there are those Forest Officers and the bloodthirsty crowd that believes in WhatsApp forwards because these individuals are unable to distinguish between fake videos and real news; they lack intellectual literacy.
The movie, which Tejpal wrote with Gaurav Dhingra and Swapnil Salkar, suggests that misinformation and blind hatred are the primary drivers of decay in today's society. Most people have just stopped being kind on a fundamental level - everybody is more concerned about themselves. Gautam constantly tries to distance himself and his brother from Jhumpa's situation. He doesn't care about her and wants to simply leave the railway station with his brother. Gautam is in a hurry to reach his mother's wedding. This wedding thing exists merely as a sort of thesis point (it's not the so-called "progressives" who get it — it's the ones who have actually been through it), and it didn't work for me. I also couldn't believe that Gaurav took so long to call Pandit Ji (Harish Khanna). Given how arrogantly he behaves at the railway station, he looks like the kind of man who would take out his privilege card almost instantly. This particular thought pokes holes in the fabric of the film. When taken as a whole, Stolen can come across as a thesis on the moral decay of society and how empathy is the cure for this disease (the script is more calculated and less convincing). But what prevents the film from feeling like a set of intellectual points is the intensity with which Tejpal sells the story. The "thriller elements" — the cat-and-mouse chase portions — are not just superficially tense. Through the tension, the ugly results of fake news are made evident. But what attracts you to Tejpal is his attitude toward the situation at hand. He is critical, all right, but he never becomes an outright cynic. He reveals himself to be an optimist who sees light at the end of the tunnel. Tejpal seems filled with love and kindness; he tries to find what's been stolen.
Final Score- [7/10]
Reviewed by - Vikas Yadav
Follow @vikasonorous on Twitter
Publisher at Midgard Times