CTRL works overall, but it does not carry a sense of revelation that makes you slap your forehead. Here’s the issue: We already know that we are controlled by technology. We already know that Big Brother is watching us on all the e-equipment we use. The rest of this review may contain spoilers…
Ananya Panday plays Nella and Vihaan Samat plays Joe, and they meet-cute at college and become a couple. Sorry: they become an influencer couple. Their every move is recorded as a photo or a video or a reel and put up on social media, and this makes you wonder if this relationship is real or… virtual. Working from a story by Avinash Sampath, Vikramaditya Motwane shows us the first five years of Nella and Joe almost entirely through screens. The immersive visual effects in CTRL are as smooth as silk. We seem to be watching this couple on our devices. We seem to be among their many followers typing out comments with emojis. And when they break up (this is in the trailer), we are among the people watching this mess like an accident we cannot look away from. The point is partly about Joe and Nella’s addiction to the virtual world, and partly about our own addiction to the virtual world populated by the likes of Joe and Nella.
There are some valid (and uncomfortable) questions being asked in CTRL. When we put up a personal photo or record a personal event, how much of that is motivated by our desire to record a genuine emotional state, and how much is about wanting to cash in on that emotional state with “likes” and “comments”? How much of our lives is a branding exercise? For instance, if I am recording a movie review in front of my bookshelf, is that bookshelf just a prop, or is some part of me projecting an image – an image of someone who loves reading – and therefore hoping that a publisher will want to collaborate with me on a project that fetches me money? Going back to the movie, is Joe really at fault for cheating on Nella? Were they really in a “real” relationship to begin with, the kind of relationships we knew before apps and smartphones became part of our lives?
I hope someone makes a movie with this angle, about how we look at relationships in this techno-age. CTRL, though, becomes a thriller. (Again, this is in the trailer.) In a plot point reminiscent of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Nella opts to “delete” (or maybe we should say “DEL”) Joe from her life. Just like he is no longer there in her physical life, she wants his memories gone from her online life. And she enlists the help of an AI company. Ananya Panday is superb as Nella, playing the spectrum from Insta-ready twentysomething with Insta-ready poses and smiles, to someone who realises what “real life” is. Nella finds out that there are worse things than being parodied by the #RasodeMeinKaunTha rapper Yashraj Mukhate. Complemented by Sneha Khanwalkar’s jangly techno score, her life begins to resemble one of Hollywood’s paranoia thrillers from the 1970s, something like The Parallax View or Three Days of the Condor or The Conversation.
CTRL works overall, but it does not carry a sense of revelation that makes you slap your forehead. The film is beautifully made and acted (Vihaan Samat is solid in a smaller role), but here’s the issue: We already know that we are controlled by technology. We already know that Big Brother is watching us on all the e-equipment we use. The sense of a public interest group being some sort of band of rebels never gets across to the extent that we feel any real danger – and that’s perhaps because we have already made peace with the fact that our lives are being controlled by AI, which has access to our computers and phones and is selling our data to big corporations. (The name of the technology company that Nella uses may make you smile.) What works are the human moments, like Joe being wiped out mechanically from Nella’s images and videos: it’s a robotic erasure of what was once a living-breathing emotion. The real message of CTRL may not be that technology is dangerous but that we ourselves are transforming from flesh and blood to bits and bytes.
