Stolen Movie Review Rating: 
Star Cast: Abhishek Banerjee, Shubham Vardhan, Mia Maelzer
Director: Karan Tejpal
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What’s Bad: Nothing
Loo Break: Not Needed
Watch or Not? Not if you expect a racy Abbas-Mustan thriller!
Language: Hindi with Subtitles
Available On: Prime Video
Runtime: 90 minutes
User Rating:
Filmmaking, once upon a time, had two very balanced genres – the Masala films and the films that had a purpose. The ones that could evoke empathy and push you to ponder. But it has been a long time since there has been a good social commentary that might make us stop, take time, and think! Directed by Karan Tejpal, Stolen falls into the second category. The film connects for a reason, and it will make you feel uncomfortable for a lot of things and, the primary one being judging a character!
The film is a 90-minute thriller, so it dives straight to the point without wasting any time! Gautam (Abhishek Banerjee) arrives at the Railway Station to pick up his brother Raman (Shubham Vardhan) and the two brothers are headed for their Mom’s wedding. There is a woman Jhumpa, with her infant Champa she crosses paths with Raman as the newborn goes missing!
She blames Raman for being the kidnapper, and he justifies he isn’t unknowingly; Raman is dragged into this mess of a missing child since he is the prime witness who saw a woman running with a child! As the police intervene, the story turns into one of the most thrilling road films that focuses on a lost and found case, only to comment on our social and moral compass with each passing minute!
Now, coming to the two brothers – Gautam and Raman! While Raman, played by Shubham Vardhan, is the empathetic one and offers to help the woman find her lost child, prioritizing his human behavior over his mother’s wedding! Meanwhile, Gautam, played by Abhishek Banerjee, is a practical man from the privileged class. He schools his younger brother for ‘pachde mein phasna’ because that is what a lost child or, for that matter, any other issue that does not concern him is – ‘Pachda.’
The brothers in Stolen stand up for each other, and Gautam hesitantly and angrily surrenders to Raman’s urgent need to help a distressed woman find her abducted child! The story takes a bizarre turn when a video from the Railway Station goes viral, and in confusion, Gautam and Raman are tagged as ‘Bachcha Chor’ with a mob dying to kill them!
What is more suffocating and would make you anxious is the setup of these incidents. You see a place that you cannot call a city or a town. It is just a place with some people. The environment is chilling because all you focus on is people dying to kill people without even fact-checking! It hits hard, harder than a reality check! No one knows anyone, and everyone has a common purpose – to kill two men because Social media claims they have stolen a child! It is chilling when you watch this randomness unfold on screen!
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Stolen shines, and it mostly depends on the strength of Abhishek Banerjee’s magnetic, although disturbing, presence. It is not that he has played such a character for the first time. He is a master at delivering complex and morally ambiguous characters, but Stolen is a quiet journey that makes him not just act on screen but transport the eeriness in the silences. He talks through the discomfort and the desperation of the story, and he compels you to relate to him! All of us are Gautam, and in most parts of our lives, we are unperturbed by whatever’s happening in the world, but I do hope that we all connect with Gautam’s transformation as well! But Mia Maelzer is the one who steals the film in moments.
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Karan Tejpal brings that genre of film that used to hold a mirror to society! There are no larger-than-life heroes; in fact, there are no heroes at all! There are two flawed men who turn into heroes because of their guts, determination, and newfound responsibility towards society and towards another human being in general! Stolen has a disturbing presence, which is unsettling in a lot of frames. A child is lost, but nowhere do we find an urgency to think about the child! Trust me, when you watch it, all you’ll be invested in would be – who did it? Not once will the thought cross that a newborn of 4 – 5 months is not with his mother! Imagine the trauma for a mother and a child who can’t speak, emote, or express.
The film gets more disturbing when a woman who is dealing with the uncertainty and the trauma of losing a child is turned into a victim! She is the prime victim of the abduction case because, come on, you do not trust a dusty, rusty mazdoor from a marginalized section of society, right? They are meant to be criminals! So, while Jhumpa cries and howls and blames people, distressed over a lost child, her agony is a mere ‘naatak’ for everyone! Mia Maelzer makes sure to become this woman in real life! You can’t differentiate between the reel and the real!
Stolen doesn’t shy away from pinpointing the basic issues we have been dealing with and still deal with in our society – poverty vs privilege. The divide is clearly identified and established when two grown-up men attend their Mom’s wedding and tell the same to the policeman who asks them, ‘Kiski Maa Ki Shaadi?’ The thought is too restricted to the privileged class; it is alien to the rest of us! Coming from this privileged background, Abhishek Banerjee’s Gautam is dumped into the raw and rusty roads of reality, and his journey to find himself as a person might be celebratory!
This Lost & Found story is also about finding one’s own social and moral compass, and that is probably why there is no urgency to find a child. The story, in fact, focuses on people who have lost their humane sides and are finding themselves as a priority!
Stolen comes with its flaws, but it fights those flaws brilliantly and tries to focus on the subject, not building unnecessary characters. It does not offer resolutions; it just offers some uncomfortable truths about how you deal with them. The film stays with you even after 90 minutes, and I guess this is where Karan Tejpal and Gaurav Dhingra, the director and the producer, win! The film has been backed by Vikramaditya Motwane, Nikhil Advani, Kiran Rao, and Anurag Kashyap!
Stolen shines as a powerful piece from cinema. It is not the film that sparks social conversations, but it is definitely the film that pushes you to rate yourself as a human being; while all of us live in the dilemma of being a Gautam or a Raman in life, we never really make an effort to travel the distance from Gautam to Raman. This journey might cost you a lot, but is the journey worth something? We clearly need to decide.
4 stars.
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