CTRL: Ananya Panday plays the world’s most clueless social media influencer in Vikramaditya Motwane’s wildly uneven Netflix movie

Normally, one of the most frustrating things that a movie can do is to abandon its characters and become too consumed by the plot. Our mainstream cinema has always struggled with this, and things have only become worse in the streaming era. It is said that show runners, in particular, can get away with anything on digital platforms as long as there is a murder in the first episode. Well, someone most certainly dies at the end of the first act in CTRL, the new film from Vikramaditya Motwane — his first feature since AK vs AK in 2020.
And as with that film, the characters in CTRL are so uninteresting that you’re willing to forgive it for diving headfirst into an elaborate (and often harebrained) plot. But as it progresses, CTRL grows more and more distant from its protagonist, which is odd, considering what kind of movie it is. Executive produced by Timur Bekmambetov, a man who can now claim association with both Angelina Jolie and Aparshakti Khurana, CTRL is a ‘screenlife’…