Star Cast: Babil Khan, Rasika Dugal, Gandharv Dewan, Nimisha Nair
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Director: Amit Golani
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What’s Bad: Nothing in specific.
Loo Break: Not Necessary
Watch or Not?: Definitely Yes.
Language: Hindi
Available On: Zee5
Runtime: 1 hr 50 minutes
User Rating:
Tum mujhe control nahi kar rahi, mere phone ko control kar rahi ho. When a restless, helpless Babil Khan, in a reprimanding voice, tells this to an unknown caller who knows everything about him because she mistakenly has her home, we cannot contemplate how this engaging thriller will turn out to be! But it turns out much scarier and makes us more anxious than we thought!
Babil Khan’s film Logout set up the premise very clearly with its trailer! Pratyush Dua is a loved and popular social media influencer with lots of fans, but his life turns upside down when he loses his phone. A fan tries to control his life for just one purpose – to get Pratyush’s undivided attention, just like she gives him priority and attention in his life!
The film dives right into its theme – the chaos social media and a smartphone can make in your life. It starts hinting at the setup with each and every scene, how we are being distanced from everyone and sharing all of our emotions with invisible people who actually do not care. But does Logout make an impact? Well, without a doubt, Yes. In a big way since it deals with a linear setup and does not deviate. In fact, by the end of it, the film leaves us wanting more since some unresolved plots are never taken into consideration during the storyline!
Written by Biswapati Sarkar, the story of Logout has a lot to say, but it is all unsaid. The film is written and says very little on screen, but you will keep reading between the lines, thinking, analyzing, and assessing the impact of social media and technology right while you are watching it. I have no idea how Biswapati Sarkar achieved this in a thriller film, but you do not miss a thing. Still, your mind is super active while watching it, and you will keep discussing and dissecting the pros and cons of our tech-dominated life along with the movie’s progression graph!
In fact, the powerful writing is visible throughout in every nitty-gritty detail, which does not seek attention, but they settle at the back of your mind, and you keep pondering over them while the film moves ahead. For instance, in one of the scenes, Babil’s character Pratyush tries to recall the phone numbers of his family members after he loses his phone. But he cannot! It certainly made me think about my contact details; I was not sure if I remembered my own cell phone number as well, and there was this urgency to cross-check, then and there, while the movie progressed to the next scene and even Pratyush was trying a probable combination of numbers he could recall and putting them together to check if any of it looked recognizable to him! It’s such a small detail, but it leaves you with a heavy breath!
Logout is made of many such heavy breathing moments, and there is no sigh of relief till the end of it. It will just make you restless at times, and it will put your brain to work; in fact, it will overwork and overthink at times, but trust me, none of it would qualify as overthinking in today’s time!
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Babil Khan is brilliant as Pratyush Dua. He picks up the anxious tone of a social media influencer to perfection. There are scenes that might qualify as a masterclass for star kids on how to perform. Interestingly, his graph as a performer trends upward right from his debut film to this one, and this is such a satisfying graph. He proves that he is trying hard and working to live up to the legacy he holds! Babil is Qabil, undoubtedly, and he might satisfy all Irrfan fans with his performance in Logout because he is real, raw, and effortless. He smirks, he smirks, it is not pretentious, he cries, he does it with all his heart, he behaves like a jerk, and he does that with conviction as well!
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Amit Golani has done a brilliant job with this cyber-thriller where it makes you think, but his film does not preach a thing! It is your insecurities that do the talking. In fact, to escape the preachiness, Amit Golani makes sure to skip some issues and not resolve them at all, which, honestly, I was waiting for. Pratyush is a character who is in a race against another influencer to get the 10 million mark first. He is so desperate that he uses a fake ID to troll the other influencer and shame the woman! And then reprimands the troll from his real ID! I know people who do that! But I get excited when this fake ID comes into existence in a very different scenario in the scene. I was expecting a blowup there with people spotting how he is the lame man who trolls women from fake IDs but nothing happens at that end! I am still not sure if this was done deliberately to not let the film deviate, but this was a major loophole that stuck with me for a good 3 minutes before the film progressed.
There are more such unresolved issues that get sidelined as the film focuses only on Pratyush, his lost phone, and the unknown Fan who blackmails him and demands only his attention because that would be her birthday gift!
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Logout works brilliantly in each and every detail. Right from Babil nailing the shades of a 20-something influencer who does not have his moral compass pointing in the right direction either, to an obsessed fan who cannot segregate between reel and real, the person and the projected personality!
My only problem with Logout is the resolution. It is a cyber-thriller, but it totally dilutes the discussion it should have had around cybercrime. I was excited when Pratyush decided not to go to the police since the negative publicity was pushing him towards the 10 million followers. But I was expecting a rather aware and important dialogue on cybercrime here, which goes missing.
In one of the scenes, Pratyush asks his blackmailer/fan, “Tumhe lagta hai main 10 million followers ke liye jaan de dunga?” And she replies, “10 million ke liye nahi, 1 follower ke liye.” She demands exclusivity, and it is scary, but the film fails to build the horror at times. This could be a perfect answer to a Black Mirror episode as Babil Khan gets his Fan as strong as Shah Rukh Khan’s film, but the only problem is it leaves you wanting for more and does not leave you satisfied. But it is at par with Fan, with Amit Golani’s direction and Babil’s acting skills, but at times, it is better than Fan, thanks to Biswapati Sarkar’s brilliant writing.
4 stars.
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