Logout Has Its Tense Edgy Moments But Is Compromised  By A Botched Last Act

Rating: ***

  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 selfimportant  “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, what do they  hope to discover at the end of the tunnel?).Writer Biswapati Sarkar and director Amit Golani  capture one evening of  Pratyush 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 centrestage almost throughout  like a Shakespearean rookie in a one-act play, does well for himself.

But the scenestealer 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 selfappointed 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 of 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  a bit too smart for its own moves, the film is all the same not bereft of  merit.