'Stolen' review: Karan Tejpal's first-rate, economical thriller is powered by exceptional performances and staging

What could possibly go wrong when, after a normal train trip, you've just arrived at the railway station, to join your sibling to attend an auspicious family function? Who knew that in a few hours, two brothers would be chased by a lynch mob? Filmmaker Karan Tejpal begins his film Stolen with a woman's baby being snatched by a mysterious figure from a railway station at night while she was asleep. On the same platform are two brothers preparing to attend their mother's wedding function.

Whether this is their mother's second or third wedding is irrelevant here. The film is interested in disrupting these brothers' ordinary lives with this baby-snatching incident which has nothing whatsoever to do with them. However, by morning the next day, things have taken such a wild turn that these brothers end up being all over the news.

Stolen, streaming on Prime Video, is one of the scariest films I've seen, not because it ventures into supernatural territory — although, I have to say, there is one situation where the main characters are forced to go to a "haunted" house and become embroiled in a nightmarish scenario that only gets worse from thereon. I would say that after Nikhil Nagesh Bhat's Kill, Stolen is a superlative case of an independent film with a few relatively unknown and one or more established actors that achieves a lot with very little.

The film is a first-rate example of the acting, writing, and directing teams working together in perfect harmony to deliver a supreme white-knuckle experience, where the viewer gets a palpable sense of the sweat-inducing, mettle-testing chaotic chain of events that not only reveals new twists in the plot but also provide insight into the main characters. It's a story where you take delight in seeing these characters getting moulded and transformed by events beyond their control.

Stolen is elevated by the first-rate cast, chiefly comprising Mia Maelzer as Jhumpa, the mother who lost her baby, and who seems to be holding more unpleasant secrets that will be revealed in due time; and Abhishek Banerjee ("Paatal Lok", "Stree 2") and Shubham Vardhan as brothers Gautam Bansal and Raman Bansal, respectively, who have two different perspectives on the whole situation, and who will eventually find a middle ground.

These three actors, who are aided by a competent supporting cast, sink into their characters with such conviction and relish that they ensure, in such a short amount of time, that you are firmly invested in their journey. There is one chase sequence with the kind of energy that's as scary as anything you find in the best zombie thrillers or one of those Mad Max adventures.

Stolen is one of those films that grabs your attention from the get-go. And in this age of dwindling attention spans and declining quality of most mainstream Bollywood fare, such films are a rarity. It's a gritty, lean and mean film that upends certain expectations as to what a "thriller" is supposed to do. I would even go so far as to say that it manages to generate some of the anxiety I felt while watching Alfonso Cuaron's 2006 film Children of Men, which also concerned a woman and a baby, but with a diametrically opposite story.

 

Film: Stolen

Director: Karan Tejpal

Cast: Abhishek Banerjee, Shubham Vardhan, and Mia Maelzer

Rating: 4/5

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