‘CTRL’ movie review: Ananya Panday is in control in this timely lesson on the dangers of AI

Ananya Panday as Nella in ‘CTRL’
| Photo Credit: Netflix

A cautionary tale on cybercrime and artificial intelligence, CTRL works like a ready reckoning on online behaviour for social media junkies and feels like it has been designed to showcase the budding talent of Ananya Panday. Many of us have yet to recover from the shenanigans of Bae when director Vikramaditya Motwane unleashes the effervescence of Ananya in yet another variant of the coming-of-age template for Gen-Z.

Starting with Kho Gaye Hum Kahan, it seems Ananya has cracked the code of playing airheaded characters judged on Instagram. They demand such low expectations from the audience that when they gather a few more grams of gravity and the screenplay develops a few ounces of nuance, it feels like she has made such a long journey.

It requires innate charm and a degree of emotional malleability to make such nebulous characters work and Ananya shows the skill of lending fizz to a fuzzy personality that is not uncommon among today’s youth.

Cut from the same cloth, Nella Awasthi (Ananya) and Joe Mascarehnas (Vihaan Samat) are social media influencers who work in tandem. Making money out of moments, they live life online. Vikram succeeds in creating a genuine portrait of online chatter where privacy becomes redundant and creating a catchy narrative matters more than the truth. However, in the rush to gather as many likes as possible, the two become unsure whether they really like each other.

After an incident creates a crack in their joyous life, Nella decides to erase Joe digitally from her life. She turns to an app that offers a playful AI assistant to wipe out the memories gradually and tastefully but it leads to some real repercussions. As her bubble bursts, Nella figures out how her dreams have been stolen along with her data but is there a way to log out of this parasitical network?

Vikram has the knack for creating drama around the dangers of having the Midas touch – one should be careful before making a wish. It generated a sense of suffocation in Trapped (2016) and here again, when technology starts taking control of Nella’s life, one can feel the choke in the throat. Coming at a time when social media influencers are being cast to sell films, Instagram followers of an actor are factored in while making casting choices, and OTT platforms have the phone numbers and email accounts of the audience to keep a tab on their taste, Ctrl does generate an eerie feeling about the impending dangers of losing control over our life and relationships.

Having said that, Vikram subverts but doesn’t show us the black mirror for beyond the mood and the messaging, the tension doesn’t hold and eventually Ctrl unravels like a low-stakes thriller meant to keep the library of its streaming platform populated.

CTRL is currently streaming on Netflix