Title: Stolen
Director: Karan Tejpal
Cast: Abhishek Banerjee, Mia Maelzer, Shubham Vardhan, Harish Khanna, Sahidur Rahman
Where: Streaming on Prime Video
Rating: 4 Stars
Director Karan Tejpal’s debut feature film arrives like a flicked cigarette into dry brush: swift, smoky, and liable to ignite something larger. What begins as a seemingly isolated tragedy—a baby snatched from a weary mother at a nondescript railway station—spirals into a taut, morally fraught thriller that picks at India’s festering social divides with surgical precision and a hint of theatrical flair.
The setup is deceptively simple. Two well-heeled brothers—Raman, earnest and wide-eyed (Shubham, who carries the film’s soul), and Gautam, slicker than an oil spill (Abhishek Banerjee, clearly enjoying his turn as the reluctant participant)—witness the desperate accusation of a mother, Jhumpa (a heartbreakingly grounded Mia Maelzer), who claims her child has been abducted. The police are summoned. Judgements are made. Then the script rips its shirt open, flexing into a full-blown descent into systemic rot, suspicion-fueled mobs, and what can only be called an ethical demolition derby.
Tejpal modulates his tone with surprising finesse for a first-time director. The film eschews the usual over-salted melodrama of social thrillers in favour of a slow marinade in dread. One moment we’re navigating the stuffy awkwardness of familial obligation, the next we’re sprinting through alleyways dodging a mob with more WhatsApp forwards than critical thinking. What makes Stolen tick is its refusal to let the viewer settle—morally, narratively, or even spatially. The camera jolts between handheld realism and sweeping drone shots, suggesting both documentary grit and cinematic ambition. One might call it poverty porn with a conscience, but Tejpal mostly sidesteps that trap by centring character over spectacle.
Still, for all its nerve, the film doesn’t entirely escape the sophomore curse—despite being a debut. There are moments when the film wants very badly to be profound and settles for being merely loud. The background score, for instance, often misjudges the moment, ladling on tension where silence might have screamed louder. Some of the dialogue teeters on the edge of thematic overkill as if the screenplay doesn’t quite trust us to grasp the horror of indifference or the volatility of misinformation. And while the film runs a lean 95 minutes, its final act threatens to derail under the weight of just-one-more-twist syndrome.
But what rescues it—again and again—is performance. Shubham, especially, is magnetic without ever straining. He plays Raman like a man whose moral compass works just fine, thank you, but who must constantly recalibrate it in a world with no true north. Banerjee’s Gautam offers a compelling counterpoint: urbane, cynical, and only slowly realizing that the world doesn’t care about his Rolex. And Mia Maelzer brings a weary, wounded ferocity to Jhumpa that never lapses into caricature.
Ultimately, what starts as a rescue mission turns into a damning portrait of how easily truth unravels when privilege sets the narrative. The film works not because it solves any of the issues it raises—poverty, privilege, institutional decay—but because it dares to throw its characters and us into their crosshairs.
