The year’s greatest thriller, already?

Taut is a peculiar adjective It means tight of course Somehow Irsquove never seen it used in any other context mdash say relationships shoelaces pants comicroutineshellipThe word only goes with films for some reason mdash specifically when you call a thriller a ldquotaut thrillerrdquoAnd thatrsquos precisely the description I inevitably come across among criticscontentcreators to do with the film Stolen on Amazon Prime Video cowritten directed by debutant Karan Tejpal cowritten produced by Gaurav DhingraItrsquos set over a night in the boondocks of presumably HaryanaRajasthan with three leads an impoverished woman Mia Maelzer whose child got stolen while she was asleep on a railway platform an affluent bloke Shubham Vardhan who was then on that platform and his brother Abhishek Banerjee whorsquos come down to pick him up from the mofussil railway station in the dead of the nightKaran Tejpal writerdirector PicFerda Demir right Gaurav Dhingra writerproducer PicRupin MehtaThis triggers off a series of wholly unpredictable eventsincidences unwittingly involving those two urban dudes who were merely on their way to their momrsquos destinationweddingHow do you arrive at a taut thriller so to say I suppose by firstly trimming all the fat from the screenplay mdash that rarely if ever segues into detailed backstories forget flashbacks for characters concerned Viewer must join dots Attention mustnrsquot waver Plotrsquos the pointSo for instance while you can figure the underprivileged girl Jhumpa in the film is possibly a tribal in a scene she mentions Bonbini whorsquos the guardian spirit of Sunderbans spanning southern Bangladesh and West BengalI ask director Tejpal producer Dhingra where shersquos from They tell me ldquoShe was originally supposed to be from Bangladesh But once Maelzer joined the cast she suggested Santhal tribe also eastrdquoMaelzer had worked extensively with tribals there practicing theatre and felt could crack the character convincinglyLikewise leadactor Banerjee is Bong of course but he plays a Punjabi Bansal and I wonder how he causally goes Bangla on occasionTejpal laughs ldquoWe actually had a scene to explain that his wifersquos Bengali But thatrsquod be unnecessary Enough Indians speak multiple languagesrdquoWhich is true And often refraining from overexplanation is inherently respecting the audiencersquos intelligence let alone patienceFrom a metropolitan perspective what squarely hits you in the solar plexus about Stolen is how believable the story feels despite the craziness of it allStarting with street cops mdash Haryanvi in this case going ldquohaanvairdquo for lsquohaan bhairsquo mdash that in some form and sometime or the other have been a nightmare for most people I knowTejpal has stories from previous shoots Dhingra has saved friends from police in the pastTraumabonding apart Tejpal and Dhingra have been around in the Mumbai movieindustry crew for a while In fact they once worked on the same film Rakeysh Omprakash Mehrarsquos Dilli 6 2009 although separatelySpeaking of Mehra if you go back to Rang De Basanti RDB 2006 yoursquoll discover both the male leads of this movie Vardhan and Banerjee in the same lsquoaudition scenersquo in a twobit roleItrsquos probably the first time Banerjee was before a film camera Hersquos a legit staractor now Hathoda Tyagi from Paatal Lok Jana from Stree series etcDhingra was line producer on RDB though he never met these actors then Now hersquos an independent producer Angry Indian Goddesses Beyond the Known WorldLife movies strange coincidences off and onscreen noItrsquos when they were making ad films together that Tejpal showed Dhingra the infamous moblynching videos from Karbi Anglong Assam in 2018Dhingra says he was then simultaneously working on a series to do with missing children Seemingly the two strands stitched together to sculpt StolenThe core idea of which much like the Karbi Anglong incident spotlights the spectre of fakenews forwards and FacebookWhatsApp videos where the mob is the multiheaded monster and socialmedia the uncontrollable catalyst As with Sudhir Mishrarsquos Afwaah 2023 also set over a nightAt the centre of it is a baby getting inhumanely passed around like in Devashish Makhijarsquos Joram 2023 that I found to be mildly farfetched but for Manoj Bajpayee in it and of course that cracklingtrainaction sequenceIn the periphery of the dark racy raw thriller Stolen is that obvious question of two Indias where one simply canrsquot recognise the other as we digtravel deeper mdash not too far from Navdeep Singhrsquos NH 10 2010 that was produced among others by Anurag Kashyap and Vikramaditya MotwaneBoth of whom along with filmmakers Nikkhil Advani Kiran Rao have selflessly lent their names onboarding as executive producers of Stolen shortly before the film dropped online Surely that counts for muchYet no greater recco than Stolen having premiered at the top Venice Film Festival in August 2023 mdash selected for the competitive Orizzonti Extra section which is the equivalent of Cannesrsquos Un Certain Regard really rare for a desi picTejpal tells me ldquoUnfortunately that is of no consideration for film execs in India if anything itrsquos a negativerdquoTo which Dhingra adds ldquoFestival becomes a label indie hence arthouse therefore boring We made a commercial film Entertaining because itrsquos engagingrdquoEither way I notice Stolen trending globally from India on Prime Video equally gravitating filmbuffs and filmmakers around it locally Can totally see whyMayank Shekhar attempts to make sense of mass cultureHe tweets mayankw14 Send your feedback to mailbagmiddaycomThe views expressed in this column are the individualrsquos and donrsquot represent those of the paper