How recent films show the unravelling of digital India

If you feel the urge to put tape over your webcam, change your passwords and make your social media accounts private, you’re not alone. Three recently released films hone in on the troubling realities of an increasingly digital India, committing to screen the anxiety that spikes every time we glance at ours. Love Sex Aur Dhokha 2, CTRL and Dream Girl—a segment of American horror anthology V/H/S/ Beyond—all see fame as a Faustian bargain, in which the internet grants people a bigger platform than ever, but they’ve never been made to feel smaller, reduced to view counts, their choices determined by algorithms. Being watched never translates to being seen or understood, and everyone is always performing, whether or not the cameras are on.

“In 20-30 years, we’ll be looking at social media the way we look at smoking now,” says CTRL director Vikramaditya Motwane. “It’s so unhealthy. We’ll wonder how we ever let our kids use smartphones and develop that need for online validation.” If the Timur Bekmambetov-produced American screenlife thrillers Missing (2023) and Searching (2018) argue that you can’t really know someone until you track their digital footprint, then CTRL, which he also executive produced, is both a counterpoint to and extension of that idea—that the natural consequence of a life lived online is that everyone thinks they know you. When influencer Nella (Ananya Panday) confronts her cheating boyfriend Joe (Vihaan Samat) over livestream, the comments are predictably hurtful. Frustrated, she signs over control of her life to the app CTRL, but really should’ve read the terms and conditions more carefully, a conclusion backed by conversations Motwane had with the Internet Freedom Foundation, which revealed how lacking India is when it comes to data protection laws.

Control is also the central theme of Virat Pal’s V/H/S segment, Dream Girl, in which a Bollywood manager crafts his idea of the perfect starlet. Tara (Namrata Sheth) is initially suspected of being a witch, and despite the short’s horror leanings, it’s easy enough to dismiss those whispers as part of a smear campaign against a successful actress. The truth is stranger—Tara is an AI-powered robot, overworked and exhausted, but cheaper and more efficient than hiring a flesh-and-blood actor. “You know why you’re valued in this business?” her manager (Ashwin Mushran) asks. “Because you do more for less.” A mask of a human face, moulded to fit neatly over her wiring, illustrates how easy it is to be impersonated in the age of deepfakes and AI. That the film unfolds on a Bollywood film set calls to mind actors subjected to digital scans who later worry about their image being used without their permission. Just last year, actor Anil Kapoor won a legal battle to protect his likeness. “Where my image, voice, morphing, GIFs and deepfakes are concerned, I can straightaway… send a court order and injunction and they have to pull it down,” he told Variety. In August, singer Arijit Singh won a case against AI impersonating his voice in songs.

The Los Angeles-based Pal recalls last year’s SAG-AFTRA (Screen Actors Guild–American Federation of Television and Radio Artists) strike, in which performers sought protections against the creation and use of their digital replicas. What also scares the director, who drew from Ex Machina (2014) and The Terminator (1984) for Dream Girl, is how AI art is not always immediately recognisable. “I saw Late Night With The Devil (2024) at a screening and didn’t realise it had AI-generated images until it was called out online,” he says.

Similarly, IRaH, a Hindi film released in April, follows the CEO of an AI app that promises “digital immortality” through face mapping, only for his technology to be used against him when he’s kidnapped and morphed videos of him are circulated. Love Sex Aur Dhokha 2, a triptych of stories like the first film, and CTRL also touch upon the dangers of AI and what it means to have your face and voice stolen, then manipulated against you. The third LSD2 segment features a game vlogger (Abhinav Singh) who spirals after an anonymous account posts morphed photos of him having sex with another man.

CTRL’s AI Allen has a distinct Ranveer Singh look, so much so that Motwane nicknamed him after the actor, though he says the resemblance wasn’t intentional. By the end of the film, however, Nella finds her boyfriend’s face co-opted as a digital avatar by the same company that had him killed. CTRL is the second streaming release this year that finds Panday confronting the evils of big tech. In the Amazon Prime series Call Me Bae, she’s a journalist who exposes the CEO of a telecom company (Sahil Shroff) for mining his customers’ data. The revelation of a Bollywood actress’ (Karishma Tanna) pregnancy comes from piecing together information from her period-tracking app, a plotline that comes five years after UK advocacy group Privacy International reported that Bengaluru-based period tracker Maya had been sharing users’ sexual health data with Facebook.

LSD2, CTRL and Dream Girl all view people themselves as yet another product of the digital age, both in the way that our private data can be harvested and sold, and how being chronically online chips away at our humanity. The first LSD2 segment features a transwoman reality show contestant (Paritosh Tiwari) obsessed over by thousands, yet misgendered repeatedly. Meanwhile, vlogger Shubham gains 40,000 followers in two hours after the lewd photos are posted. “Mazak udaane aaye hai sab log (Everyone’s just here to make fun of me),” he says. “Kya farak padta hai, bhai? (What difference does it make?)” his manager (Subhra Sourav Das) replies. It doesn’t matter why they’re here. Just that they are. Just as the “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore” speech from Network (1976) goes from righteous rant to mindlessly repeated audience slogan, Shubham’s insistence that it isn’t him in those pictures becomes a punchline. Similarly, Nella’s fury at her cheating boyfriend becomes the hook to a song.

“We live in a time when we’re surrounded by cameras, and we know we’re surrounded by cameras,” says director Dibakar Banerjee. “Everybody is consuming someone else’s life and everyone is living a life to be consumed.” His research took him down influencer rabbit holes, from those who had amassed a following through videos of mundane activities such as brushing their teeth to more niche content such as the sexualised chopping of vegetables. The costs of maintaining an influencer lifestyle are also explored in the first episode of Fingertip, a 2019 Tamil anthology about the destructive power of digital spaces. An aspiring influencer (Sunainaa) is so fixated on curating a picture-perfect life on the photo-sharing app Clicker (a clear stand-in for Instagram) that it all starts to come apart behind the scenes. She loses her job, goes into debt and eventually wrecks her marriage.

While LSD2’s reality show contestants have the option to go “off cam” or pause having their lives streamed 24x7, it comes at a price—their ratings nosedive. Nella, however, welcomes digital intrusion by the end, so lonely that she can only find warmth in the reflective glow of a screen. An earlier draft had her mother ask her to buy something online, at which point she discovers that she needed a CTRL ID to be able to log in. Motwane and his writers ultimately, however, felt that the ending would pack more of an emotional punch if Nella’s choice to sign up for the app that ruined her life once more was her own. In the same way, unable to handle the stresses of the real world, Shubham disappears, escaping into the unnerving utopia of the ‘metaverse’, a virtual reality world. In this year’s films, the creeping pull of the digital world extends far beyond the four borders of the screen—vast, inescapable.

Gayle Sequeira is a film and television critic and reporter.

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