There is much to be appreciated if not exactly admired in Amit Golani’s Logout. It bravely uses a faceless voice to create a numbing terror in the protagonist, a self-important “influencer” who, like others of his ilk, seems to be influencing an anonymous mass of robotic “followers” who should forget the phone and focus on real life.
In the way the cell phone has created a parallel reality where people post their pictures thinking the world is interested in their daily activities, and in the way that the phone controls our lives, rather than the other way around, this film gets the hard reality of a civilization lost to a virtual world into a plot that essentially features just two characters: the influencer Pratyush Dua who has lost his entire universe (his phone), and a faceless female voice who now has control over Pratyush Dua’s life.
How ironical that an anonymous intruder could cause so much damage to an individual with nearly ten million “followers” (what do they follow, and what do they hope to discover at the end of the tunnel?). Writer Biswapati Sarkar and director Amit Golani capture one evening of Pratyush’s captivity in a sweaty, anxious scoop of storytelling.
Babil Khan, a chip off the old block, handles the character’s sudden descent into hell with sincerity, though too much of the performance depends on the tear ducts rather than sheer guts. Nonetheless, the young actor, holding centre stage almost throughout like a Shakespearean rookie in a one-act play, does well for himself.
But the scene-stealer is the voice of the intruder/stalker played by Nimisha Nair: playful, flirty, pleading…, bleeding, sinister psychopathic, the girl nails the disturbed character and reminds us how much ordinary people are prone to fall for the lies, deceptions, and chimerical chattiness created online by these self-appointed influencers.
It is a dangerous world out there. Logout succeeds in diving, though not too deep, into the dark web of deceit and illusion. The film is handsomely shot(Pooja S Gupte) and dexterously edited (Atanu Mukherjee). But the narrative threads come apart at the seams in the third act when, in the search for a suitable finale, a gun is introduced as a guest star when no one seems to know how to use it.
Why must our cinema flounder in pursuit of neat endings? Isn’t it better to let the chaos exist rather than put a stamp of finality to it? As long as the bedlam of digitality gets to breathe in, the narrative Logout is engaging. The minute it is made to follow a uniform code, it collapses.
Maybe it is a bit too smart for its own moves, but the film is all the same, not bereft of merit.
