Karan Tejpal’s Stolen feels like a gut punch. A 90-odd minute thriller that grips you from the first frame and doesn’t let go, it’s one of those rare stories that feels both cinematically stylised and terrifyingly real. Beneath the pulse-pounding chases and moments of moral tension lies something darker and more inescapable: the feeling that this could happen to anyone, anywhere in India, and there would be no way out.
The plot is deceptively simple. Two brothers—Gautam (Abhishek Banerjee) and Raman (Shubham Vardhan)—are headed to their mother’s wedding. But a chance encounter at a railway station with a poor labourer named Jhumpa (Mia Maelzer), whose baby has just been kidnapped, derails their lives. What starts as a misunderstanding spirals into a nightmarish descent through suspicion, bureaucratic apathy and mob hysteria.
The railway station setting is not incidental. It is a liminal space—where classes, castes and lives collide. Tejpal uses it to stunning effect, invoking the chaos of India’s margins where nothing is safe, not even reality. Here, a missing child isn’t just a tragedy; it’s a catalyst for exposing every rotten seam of our collective social fabric — police inefficiency, misinformation, class prejudice and the rage of a public always on the verge of exploding.
And explode it does. The mob attack scene is an absolute masterclass. Shot from inside a car, it’s claustrophobic, tense and feels sickeningly familiar. We’ve all seen these videos—on WhatsApp, on TV or online. But Stolen doesn’t let you swipe away. It makes you sit inside that car, frozen, watching panic set in.
The chase scenes that follow are breathless. Not just for their scale — vehicles tearing across dusty roads and mobs wielding sticks and guns — but for how closely they hug reality. There’s no superheroism here. Just survival. Barely. The choreography is brilliant not because it’s flashy, but because it’s raw. It’s immersive cinema at its most unforgiving.
Driving all of this forward are the lead performances. Shubham Vardhan’s Raman, in a heart-stopping moment, fights to stay conscious after being shot. But it’s Abhishek Banerjee who delivers the film’s most searing moments. In a lynching scene that is almost unbearable to watch, the Stree actor channels helplessness, fear and the dawning realisation of privilege lost.
