CTRL’s ending had me on pins and needles. Not because Vikramaditya Motwane’s film is that sort of a thriller but because I was worried that it’d end up being that sort of a thriller. While there’s always a place in the genre for a solid good-always-wins entertainer, I expect more from Motwane. And boy does he deliver a bleak outcome to a group of people’s fight against an evil corporation that wants to marionette the masses to their will. CTRL is decidedly grounded with its heroes and their foes. Motwane’s apt understanding of influencer couple culture and the crisis of romance in a world where it’s more about looking happy than being happy make Nella and Joe an amalgamation of people we all know. But not everything’s bad and doomed about these people. So despite their personal shortcomings and missteps, Nella and Joe have the kind of empathy and heroic instincts that you’d actually be able to associate with the rebels of the world we know. Joe’s been secretly active in this group of tech-heads who’ve been planning a takedown of Mantra Unlimited, a corporation that’s caught every segment of the national consumer market at the ends of its strings and wishes to puppet them according to their whims. Nella was thriving after dumping Joe for cheating on her, erasing his digital memory from her past with the CTRL AI, and becoming the face of high-paying brands who followed after she’d agreed to represent CTRL. But Nella wasn’t a sell-out. So when Joe goes missing, turns up dead under mysterious circumstances, and a whole archive of evidence turns up against Mantra Unlimited, Nella’s unwilling to sit on her hands just to protect the success she’s achieved.
Spoiler Alert
How does Mantra Unlimited frame Nella for Joe’s murder?
No one was willing to help Nella in her haphazard search through the mess Joe’d gotten embroiled in until she put the hard feelings about talking to the “other woman” on the back burner. She got in touch with Shonali, Joe’s coworker and the girl he’d made out with, and that’s where she got the names of the people who were just as eager to bust the whole scheme wide open. Nella wasn’t immediately convinced by Shonali’s claim that a righteous whistleblower data analyst from Mantra Unlimited was willing to hand Joe the evidence of the scam they were planning. But she figured that with Joe missing, it was worth looking into. A rigorous string of online breaking-and-entering and a chat with Mayank, the journalist who was trying to unmask Mantra, got Nella the information that she needed to put her doubts aside. It was clear that Mantra Unlimited would do anything to keep the truth from coming out, and that includes murder. Before Nella could even digest the fact that Mantra had the whistleblower killed and staged it as a robbery-turned-homicide, Joe turned up dead. Mayank’d already given her the decryption code to the folder that Joe had gotten from Karan, the mole in the company. When she breaks into it, what she finds is a video that Joe’d made before he was killed. What Joe had to say in that video would’ve definitely thrown a wrench in Mantra’s evil scheme of tricking people into opening up the vault of their personal information. That’s a very real fear in a world where we are a bit too hasty with the “agree” button when it comes to cookies and terms. While we generally tend to downplay this fear, thinking the worst that can happen are some annoying ads based on the stuff we look up and talk about, CTRL wants to open our eyes to the potential risks we’re opening ourselves up to.
Mantra Unlimited was using the CTRL AI to get illegal access to people’s systems by sneakily slipping it into the terms and conditions that people never read. In the beginning of the film, a heartbroken Nella clicked on the agree button without a second thought when what was promised was the erasure of her trigger. We saw how her system was broken into when she wasn’t even looking. She rushed to log out after hearing Joe spill the truth about the AI, but by now, the AI’s given Mantra everything that they need to frame Nella for Joe’s murder. When they first accessed her system, they looked up “Project Unicorn,” the name of the mass mind control project that Joe’s group was after. They didn’t find anything because Joe’d never told Nella about that side of his work. But when a fearless Nella is about to upload Joe’s explosive video, Mantra hacks into her home security system to distract her with false notifications about someone at her door. While Nella’s away, they edit Joe’s video to make it sound like he’s accusing Nella of acting unhinged and plotting his murder. Ironically, that’s exactly the kind of thing that Joe was trying to warn people about in his video. Nella’s life and career are done for. Mantra’s been laying their base and fortifying their defense the whole time. Remember how Joe was trying to get in touch with Nella before he went missing? Unbeknownst to Nella, the AI accessed her messages and texted Joe on her behalf. To the world that’s now fully immersed in the ban-Nella outrage, it now looks like Nella’d met Joe on the ferry where his body was found. Sensational news reports and the social media witch-hunt don’t give a hoot about Nella’s side of the story. Jealousy and admiration go hand-in-hand in the line of work Nella was in. Since it’s mostly pointless obsession that contributes to the popularity of influencers, the darker side of that is often people’s need to see these fairytale figures stumble and fall. It gives people almost a ghoulish satisfaction to watch a picture-perfect life fall to pieces. So no one came to Nella’s rescue. And since this is not a toxic-positive narrative, Nella did need help and support. What she received instead was a reality check. Mantra Unlimited’s very expensive lawyer laid down her options for her. Since her contract with Mantra deprived her of the right to ever sue the company and Nella neither had the money nor the support that she needed to bring the case to court, she was bound to lose the fight.
What happens to Nella?
CTRL’s ending is neither delusionally hopeful nor unreasonably dark. Would an ideal outcome have been actually achievable? There was no way Nella could’ve fought them in court. Mantra Unlimited controlled all the avenues of the law and their CEO Aryan K proved that he didn’t have an ethical bone in his body. The fact that he’d been arrested for insider trading and after wrapping all that up, come back to India to run his elaborate scam is proof enough that he knows what he’s doing. And he shows how low he’s willing to stoop to rule the country’s economy and make bank when he manipulates the circumstances of Nella’s arrest to peddle another invasive app to the public. He’s now entering the business of getting access to people’s dirty laundry through a mental health app and telling them what to do with their lives. He’s opting for total control, and what better way to do that than to manipulate people into doing their bidding under the garb of caring about them?
Nella took the deal. She drops all the charges against Mantra and, in return, they give her a clean slate, at least digitally. In the ending sequence of CTRL, Nella’s the face of a debilitating loss, the loss of who she was and who she wanted to be. In the midst of all the stereotyping and meaningless hate that influencers receive just for existing and doing something that brings them joy, CTRL tables the tale of Nella in a way that celebrates all the work she put into her life, and her perseverance comes through even in a scenario where she loses everything that she built. When it counted, Nella sacrificed her image and her career to fight against a grave threat to public safety. But a fight like that comes with a tall cost, and Nella lost more than her career. Now living at her parents’ house and working at her dad’s bakery, Nella’s forced to be friends with a reality that she never wanted. People who tend to opt for virtue-signaling in such circumstances will find her ungrateful for being so unhappy. But the simple fact is that virtues don’t define personal goals, and a person in Nella’s place is bound to be severely depressed because of the turn her life took. Loneliness was what first got her to lean on an AI for emotional comfort. And now, considering she’s at a much worse place emotionally and circumstances-wise, it makes sense that she reaches out to the same AI for help. Allen’s avatar is replaced with Joe’s, and hearing Joe’s voice, even though it’s not really his voice, cradles her broken heart with the kind of comfort she is familiar with. Nella practically grew up with Joe. After her parents, he was the closest thing she had to family. Despite how it ended, there were things that Joe did for Nella that couldn’t have been performative. So in the battle of all the different kinds of pain she’s felt in a very small timeframe, her grief takes precedence. Everything else, even the fact that she’s going back to the same AI that’s destroyed her life, loses meaning when faced with the extent of her grief. That’s what she’s trying to work on before anything else. And knowing Nella, I think she’ll recover.