This might not come as a revelation, but Ananya Panday is striving to become the poster girl of the instant validation-seeking Gen Z. It all started with Kho Gaye Hum Kahan, where she played a young corporate consultant, who, after being dumped, tries to lure her ex-boyfriend back by putting seductive selfies on Instagram. Call Me Bae saw her as an entitled heiress, Bella Chowdhury, who has studied ‘social media journalism’ and uses ‘hashtag’ as a spoken word. The internet has been her ally, until now. In Vikramaditya Motwane’s cyber-thriller, CTRL, she plays the Bella-rhyming Nella Awasthi, a content creator, who, unknowingly, sells her soul (and her data) to an evil AI bot.

Director: Vikramaditya Motwane

Cast: Ananya Panday, Vihaan Samat, Devika Vatsa

Streamer: Netflix

Now, I am all for actors doing similar characters in subsequent films (I stopped counting how many times Robert De Niro played a gangster), as long as they keep giving us something more. Ananya, however, seems to hit a dead-end. Her Gen Z women are unable to go beyond vanity, the need for validation and the loneliness of modern life. CTRL is a film told in screens. In a video camera format, we see Nella and Joe Mascarenhas (Vihaan Samat) falling in love through several social media videos: canoodling at a New Year party, enjoying a vacation, running on a pier and jumping off a lake. In the true spirit of a modern couple, they also start creating ‘funny’ videos together under their page ‘NJoy’(Nella+Joe). One of them is about the best places to make out in college, The answer: Chemistry lab, because well, chemistry. Motwane seems to look down upon the demographic he is portraying in the film. The videos made by Nella and Joe seem like a forced caricature of the viral content on social media. It feels like the makers are disdainfully looking at this world from the outside and not really trying to understand the people behind the posts.

In quite an Emotional Atyachaar-treatment, Nella catches Joe necking with another woman, when she goes to surprise him on their anniversary while being live on social media. It generates a flurry on the internet. Yashraj Mukhate makes a song out of her reaction. Tanmay Bhat and friends react to the video in which she is seen publicly bashing Joe. She becomes a meme. Her followers drop after the breakup. A sexist social media populace blames her. Lost and lonely, she decides to download CTRL, an AI software that can ‘delete’ Joe from her digital life. Which basically means putting a magic eraser on him in all her photos. The modern tech version of burning your ex’s photographs and flushing them down the toilet. Nella also starts opening up to the AI avatar, a ‘comic flirt’, of her choosing. She names him Allen, an anagram of her own, which is a sweet detail until she spoils it by spelling it out (“You are my AI, understand? N-E-L-L-A Nella, A-L-L-E-N Allen, don’t ever forget”). Allen plans her day, executes her social media comeback and gives her emotional support. Joe, on the other hand, goes missing. We jerkily jump from Her (2013) to Searching (2018) as Nella turns sleuth. Joe was involved in a whistleblower group trying to expose ‘Mantra Unlimited’, a fictional corporate company which owns everything, including CTRL.

For the most part, the film works like a school essay on the banes of social media. We don’t connect with Nella and Joe. Their love story doesn’t leave us yearning. As a thriller, CTRL is limited to the suspense of a reel. ‘Watch till the end…’ There is voyeurism in seeing a story unfold on screens but we also feel a distance with the characters. The film functions more as a data safety PSA than a narrative, owing to its rather plain writing. Panday overkills as the temperamental influencer who has been cheated on. In tender moments, however, she showcases some skills. Samat gets less screen time but does a sufficient job.

I won’t deny, CTRL did make me reflect on how much data I had shared with the apps. But, the film changes goalposts frequently. Is it a take on the flimsiness of relationships in the digital age? A social-media satire? A cyber-horror film? It does touch upon themes of urban isolation but doesn’t go through with it. The internet is shown to be a place only populated with “faceless trolls” and opportunistic influencers. CTRL gets the bleakness but fails to catch the absurdity of it all. During a scene, we see the comment section of a video shared by the totalitarian company Mantra’s CEO, who is denying all allegations against him. Most of the comments are supportive, along the lines of ‘Mantra is going to change the world!’ except for one which reads, ‘Sir, can I get a job?’ There is always that one guy.