If you've ever found yourself clutching your phone, scrolling past yet another WhatsApp forward about child kidnappers or vigilante mobs, you've glimpsed the world Stolen drags you into; only here, there's no 'forwarded many times' warning to brace you for the chaos.
Karan Tejpal's debut feature doesn't just lift the lid on the terrifying aftershocks of mob hysteria, it throws the viewer headfirst into the mayhem, refusing to pause, explain or offer a safe corner.
What begins as a seemingly small incident - a stolen baby, a mistaken identity - spirals into a brutal, 90-minute descent into fear, judgment, and fractured morality. Stolen doesn't tap on your shoulder to show you its politics, it grips your throat and demands you look.
Set over the course of one harrowing night, Stolen opens on a deceptively quiet note: a baby sleeps soundly in her mother's arms on a railway platform. Within minutes, that calm is ripped apart.
The infant, Champa, is snatched away by an unseen hand, and the mother, Jhumpa (Mia Maelzer), wakes up into her worst nightmare. Her cries for help are still echoing when Raman (Shubham Vardhan), a young photographer, walks onto the platform and picks up a woollen cap, innocent, except that it belonged to the kidnapped child.
The scene erupts. A crowd begins to gather, tension thickens, and suspicion, as it often does in rural India, becomes certainty far too quickly.
Raman, stunned and confused, is accused of abduction. His brother Gautam (Abhishek Banerjee), who arrives moments later to pick him up for a family wedding, finds himself thrust into the role of unlikely protector.
What unfolds from here is a tightly wound, real-time thriller in which two privileged men from the city are dragged into a world that operates on suspicion, rage and class-caste fault lines.
The police, led by the enigmatic Panditji (Harish Khanna), offer no relief. They're not cartoonish villains, but they don't inspire trust either.
Jhumpa, meanwhile, is a picture of anguish, but also contradiction. She seems to want justice, but her version of events keeps shifting. Her presence, which initially evokes sympathy, slowly begins to acquire layers that unsettle even as they intrigue.
Raman, moved by her pain, insists they help. Gautam, wary of where this is headed, would rather get out while they still can. That moral tug-of-war between empathy and self-preservation, idealism and pragmatism becomes the film's thumping heart.
Inspired by the 2018 lynching of two men in Assam, falsely accused of being child traffickers, Stolen draws its urgency from the horror of real events, but it doesn't imitate news footage or lean into docu-drama.
Instead, it crafts its own cinematic language: one of shadows, whispers, narrow roads and wider chasms.
Abhishek Banerjee delivers what is arguably the best performance of his career, shedding the comic persona often associated with him and slipping into a role that requires restraint, fear and eventual resolve.
Gautam isn't heroic at the start, he's cynical, classist and desperate to wash his hands of the mess but Banerjee slowly chisels the character into something more textured. By the time he finally rises to the occasion, it feels earned.
But the film's beating soul may just be Mia Maelzer as Jhumpa; her physicality, dialect, and mounting grief are so convincing that you're never quite sure what she's hiding beneath the hysteria. Which is exactly how Stolen wants it.
The screenplay, by Tejpal, Vardhan, Gaurav Dhingra and Swapnil Salkar, is lean and efficient, but far from simplistic. Without underlining its intent, it places the audience face-to-face with India's fault lines: how easily a man's guilt is assumed because of where he is, or who he's with; how quickly a woman's tragedy becomes a tool; how institutional apathy creates space for vigilante violence.
Unlike more didactic films, Stolen doesn't preach. It leaves room for ambiguity. There are no capital-V villains here-only fear, fatigue and desperation.
Yet, for all its grimness, Stolen is never exploitative. It could have easily veered into misery porn, but Tejpal never lets the tension become cheap. Even its chase sequences: tight, breathless, and scattered across alleys and highways, serve the story's moral and emotional unravelling.
Stolen is ultimately a story about how quickly the veil of order can be ripped apart in a country simmering with unspoken rage. It's about what happens when justice is outsourced to the mob, when systems fail and when empathy turns into liability.
But it's also, in its quiet way, about human connection-the fragile, volatile and sometimes redemptive kind that survives in the worst of times.
This isn't just one of the strongest debuts in recent Indian cinema; it's also a film that makes a fierce case for the relevance of political thrillers in an era of noise. Stolen doesn't yell. It doesn't express anger. It simply shows you the abyss, and leaves you shaken by how easy it is to fall in.
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Abhishek Banerjee, Mia Maelzer, Shubham Vardhan
