Stolen - Baby Gone - Conscience Fractured

Stolen

Hindi - Drama / Road Thriller
100 mins
Prime Video

Late at night, somewhere in rural Rajasthan, Gautam Bansal has stepped away from a family wedding to wait at a railway station for his younger brother, Raman Bansal. As the train arrives, a few benches away, a woman named Jhumpa, sleeping with her baby in her arms, wakes up to find the child missing.

A crowd gathers. The cops arrive. Fingers are pointed. Raman, trying to help, quickly becomes a suspect. Gautam, meanwhile, wants nothing to do with it and cautions Raman from getting into this messy situation.

As they stay behind to aid the search (thanks to Raman’s morality) the brothers find themselves entangled in a maze of mistrust. A photo of their tussle at the station goes viral in the town, fueling a vigilante mob (a nod to today's reporting). In the dust and confusion, the gap between being a witness and being a suspect begins to vanish. What begins as a moral detour soon turns into a reckoning. Saying anything more will be a spoiler.

Abhishek Banerjee, known for slipping between comedy and menace with ease (Stree, Paatal Lok, Vedaa), is superb as Gautam — the urban, upper-class man caught in a rural tragedy that doesn’t belong to him… until it does. Shubham as Raman, his idealistic younger brother with great honesty. In a few angles, he definitely looks like Mohammed Siraj’s doppelgänger. Mia Maelzer is devastating as Jhumpa — vulnerable, stoic, and determined all at once.

Karan Tejpal, who co-wrote and directed the film, does a superb job keeping it tight. No scene lingers, nothing feels unnecessary, the tension is maintained throughout — even in its quietest moments. The camerawork is nauseatingly effective, with plenty of close-ups and handheld shots that make us feel as harrowed and suffocated as the characters onscreen. 

Over the years, there have been many great Indian road movies, but few decent road thrillers — maybe Road (Manoj Bajpayee, Vivek Oberoi) or NH10  (Anushka Sharma) come close. But for sheer breathless tension and the impact of the story that unfolds, Stolen stays with you longer.