Karan Tejpal’s Stolen begs you not to blindly believe that WhatsApp forward

Stolen takes us to an unnamed place in rural Rajasthan where two urbane brothers accidentally get pulled into a child kidnapping case, and their world spirals soon after. The bystanders come and go, and the brothers are sucked into the cycle of WhatsApp rumours and the ensuing violence. At home, their mother, who plans to remarry, anxiously expects them. Abhishek Banerjee, who plays the elder brother, tells me that when they were shooting the mob lynching scene in the film, an elderly gentleman ended up intervening, not knowing it was a shoot.

“When I rewatched the film recently, I noticed that we’d retained him in the film,” Banerjee says, joined by Tejpal and producer Gaurav Dhingra on Zoom. “But it’s interesting that he only intervenes after the cops and their jeeps come to save the character who’s getting lynched. He couldn’t muster the courage earlier, but he was the only one who did step forward.”

Is there an inherent evil that stays the hand of the innocent bystander? Where do people like the elderly gentleman disappear when a mob overruns our common sense and humanity? The way Banerjee sees it, Stolen is not against the idea of a mob. The film, he notes, shows us three kinds of mobs: the first that is confused and wants to help the poor woman whose daughter was lifted from a railway station in the middle of the night; the second with bloodlust and a warped sense of justice; and the third that ultimately secures justice for the stolen child.