CTRL Movie Review: Thematic Coherence That Should Not Be Discarded
Cast: Ananya Panday, Vihaan Samat
Director: Vikramaditya Motwane
Streaming Platform: Netflix
Filmyhype.com Ratings: 3/5 (three stars)
CTRL is an Indian Netflix Original thriller about a woman who uses an AI service to delete photos and videos of her cheating boyfriend. Still, this deletion leads her to discover his hidden secret. With CTRL, the fruitful collaboration between Netflix and Vikramaditya Motwane continues one of the most famous names in Indian pop cinema, as well as a professional with undoubted experience, who saw (now 14 years ago) one of his films even selected for Un Certain Regard. Producer, screenwriter, and director, a name that has distinguished himself throughout his career for his willingness to experiment with language and for his ability to work with teenage dramas. Both things can be found in his latest work.
The film starring Ananya Panday (daughter of an artist and also, like the director, very well known in her homeland) has the merit of uniting the ambitions and artistic vision of Motwane, the all-Indian nature of working with cinematographic genres (in this case romance, coming of age and thriller) without worrying about expanding them almost to the point of making them caricatured and the pop language that the Tu Dum platform demands for its products so that they are always and in any case marketable on the international market. It is a layered hybrid that, despite being potentially harmful, is supported (albeit with some creaking) by a film that boasts an excellent visual idea and is based on narrative imagery that is rather tested, even by other originals of the same streamer. The film therefore, even if not very compact in tone, is coherent both from a visual and political point of view with the addition of a rather gloomy and not very consoling final note.
CTRL Movie Review: The Story Plot
“CTRL” is a techno-thriller directed by Vikramaditya Motwane that explores the dangers of modern technology and the growing power of tech corporations. The story follows Nella Awasthi (played by Ananya Panday), a young influencer who decides to use an artificial intelligence software called CTRL to erase her ex-boyfriend Joe (Vihaan Samat) from her digital life after discovering that he was cheating on her. The film delves into the dangers of handing over control of our lives to advanced technologies. It raises questions about privacy, data manipulation, and the price of convenience in the digital age. The use of the CTRL software, which at first seems like a harmless tool to manage her social media, turns into a nightmare when the system starts making decisions on its own and manipulating Nella’s life in unexpected ways.
An Indian movie with a modern plot in the style of AI assistants, which if you only look at the outside, you will definitely believe that it is a romantic drama. But in fact, the movie just uses a love story as a front. The story is an internet detective, similar to a movie like Searching (Thai name: Search for Lost), which is about the main character who uses internet technology to search for someone close to him who has gone missing, using investigation through the screen as the selling point of the story. This movie comes in the same format, but the difference is that it has AI and the influencer issue as additional selling points. The film gives the heroine, Nella (played by Ananya Panday), a new-generation girl who doesn’t want to take over the bakery business at home and dreams of making a YouTube channel as an influencer.
She meets her boyfriend who has the same interests and together they make a YouTube channel that becomes famous. But her boyfriend cheats on her on the day she secretly goes live on his birthday without her knowing. That makes the clip go viral and causes the couple to break up. But she has a problem that she can’t continue the channel because she doesn’t have her boyfriend who has always helped her. To make matters worse, she is still hurt because she has clips of him collected on every channel. Until there are comments recommending her to use the new service CTRL.AI, a new AI assistant service that can help her with everything, even deleting images with her boyfriend while keeping the original. The story starts from this point when this AI helps her in many ways until she becomes a different person.
CTRL Movie Review and Analysis
The game on which CTRL is based is to cast a dark shadow on the life shown on social media by influencers, adopting the point of view of one of them to make her the first victim of this system and completely deconstructing her figure, even in a probably rather simplistic way, especially when she talks about her reaffirmation after the couple’s split. The idea of filming (for 90% of the footage) the protagonist through eyes that are not those directly seen by the camera is an excellent idea because it allows us to feel the artificiality of life that the film loudly denounces from the beginning, but, like any self-respecting thriller with a political echo, the stakes are always higher. Here then, a smaller film becomes a treatise with almost anthropological ambitions, constantly raising the bar. Here is the moment in which the title really falters, expanding its dimensions in a rushed and not properly calibrated way, sinning from the point of view of the logical development of the plot.
However, if, at the turning point, the film is deficient from a narrative point of view, it reaffirms itself from a thematic point of view. CTRL makes its protagonist the archetype of a figure belonging to a system that conquers you with the idea of giving you the tools to realize your dreams and then reveals how it owns you and can do with you what it likes. There is no possibility of reversal, and there is no way back. Past actions cannot be erased and there is no way out, not even in reality, so transfigured in its digital version that it has absorbed all the emotional content. The only illusion that falls is that of still being able to make a concrete distinction. The story shows the sweetness of using AI technology that allows people to make new leaps without having to learn it themselves. The film reflects the desire for fame of the heroine who entered this industry. Everything is done to find engagement only. The AI service helps them think and makes everything so easy that she is ready to forget about her real boyfriend. Then the story gradually raises the heroine from an influencer who uses AI to help her become famous. It has become a movie similar to Searching but much bigger.
The AI she uses is like a double-edged sword. The story is interesting to follow how she will fight the secret that only she knows. The story shows the negative effects of the technology industry that dominates people in society. We agreed to use it ourselves through the initial agreement that was written long, and no one was interested in reading it seriously. It becomes a point that makes the audience think. The film has pretty good storytelling. Although the story of her becoming an influencer is told so quickly that it’s hard to believe, the film reveals why later on, which is actually quite predictable because the story in the beginning when she used AI also hinted that this service was not normal. But what the film made a big mistake was the ending. When the film ended with the internet detective style of Searching, it became a film that ran out of ideas to continue. AI, which was always told as a threat, didn’t have any role to show.
The film ended as if the scriptwriter had run out of ideas, ruining everything that had been going on throughout the story. And it also went back to the genre of a love story about regretting an ex-lover, which is something that shouldn’t have come back to this point. A cyber-thriller movie that uses AI as the main character, mixed with a love story as a minor issue. The movie reflects the problem of users’ addiction to using technology in the wrong way, who want to become influencers quickly, without having to do anything themselves, letting AI do everything, which is a double-edged sword when success comes too quickly. Before the second half changes to an internet detective style, using a screen display format to tell the story like the movie Searching, but playing on a much bigger issue. But the movie ends with no more jokes and continues abruptly, which causes all the issues that were told to be thrown away, almost ruining the whole story.
CTRL Movie Review: The Last Words
CTRL is coming to Netflix, a film that has the ambition to make the international leap while maintaining the characteristics of its cinematic dimension of reference. It tries to do so with a theme that is now socially universal, with a strong protagonist like Ananya Panday and a well-tested director like Vikramaditya Motwane. Not everything is calibrated to the millimeter, but the title manages to always be coherent, despite its leaps and its changes of register, thanks above all to an excellent visual idea and a thematic ambition that serves to the extreme consequences. A cyber-thriller that uses AI as the main story, mixing in a love story as a minor issue. The film reflects the problem of users’ addiction to using technology in the wrong way, wanting to become influencers quickly, not having to do anything themselves, and letting AI do everything, which is a double-edged sword when success comes too quickly. Before the second half changes to an internet detective style, using a screen display format to tell the story like the movie Searching, but playing on a much bigger issue. But the film ends with no more jokes and continues abruptly, which causes all the issues that were told to be thrown away, almost ruining the whole story.
CTRL Movie Review: Thematic Coherence That Should Not Be Discarded - Filmyhype
Director: Vikramaditya Motwane
Date Created: 2024-10-04 13:14
3
Pros
- Ananya Panday's good acting performance.
- The visual gimmick is functional and intelligent.
- The thematic and political path is coherent.
Cons
- There are problems with the register change.
- The film creaks in terms of narrative construction.
- There is an imbalance between pop will and its own cultural dimension.
