'Stolen' movie review: Thriller asking tough questions

This is a film utterly determined not to digress. It cuts to the chase right from the first scene and never loosens its grip on your jugular. And a chase it is, not just through the physical landscapes of barren and ruthless north India, but also through the rocky terrains of patriarchy, corruption, mob mentality, deadly misinformation, and more.

Stolen, Karan Tejpal's debut film, has already been featured in several global film festivals, including at Venice, where it premiered in 2023 to a standing ovation and the Beijing International Film Festival in China in 2024, where it won big. It has now come to Amazon Prime, where it is grim and pretty at 'Number One' on the charts. 

Without giving too much away, 'Stolen' begins with Jhumpa Mahato (Mia Maelzer), whose baby Champa gets stolen while she is asleep at a desolate railway station. It is night and freelance photographer Raman Bansal (Shubham Vardhan) gets off his train; his suave elder brother Gautam (Abhishek Banerjee) is waiting to pick him up. They are all set to attend their mother's second wedding. But things take an unexpected turn, and the brothers end up going on a wild chase along with Jhumpa to find her baby, escape goons who think the trio are criminals (thanks to WhatsApp forwards) and discover their own sense of fairness and empathy along the way. Chilling that this is a story based on true events  — says that much more about how callous, mindless and apathetic we are today as a society. Watch it because every now and then, we need to see ourselves in the darkening mirror.