Vikramaditya Motwane’s CTRL turns the screens people use every day into the film’s main visual world. In this Hindi-language thriller, influencer Nella Awasthi turns to an AI app after a breakup, only to find it taking control. Motwane describes the production as a hands-on, technically intricate experiment—and says the story moved beyond revenge to questions about social media, privacy, data and loneliness.
What is CTRL about?
CTRL is a 2024 Hindi-language screenlife thriller. Screenlife films tell much of their story through the digital screens their characters see: phones, computers, video calls, searches and online content. Netflix identifies Ananya Panday as Nella Awasthi and Vihaan Samat as Joe Mascarenhas, an influencer couple. After their relationship ends, Nella uses an AI app, which begins to exert control over her life.
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That format makes the interface part of the storytelling rather than a background detail. What appears in a window, a feed or a call—and how Nella responds to it—becomes the film’s visual language.
How did Motwane come to make a screenlife film?
In a 2024 interview with Scroll, Motwane said executive producer Timur Bekmambetov first approached him about making a screenlife movie. Motwane had enjoyed Searching and Unfriended, and was drawn to a format built around familiar online habits: scrolling social media, watching videos, searching and making video calls.
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The interview also places CTRL in the context of Bekmambetov’s screenlife-film work, mentioning Unfriended: Dark Web (2018) and Missing (2023), as well as Searching (2018). These titles offer context for the format, not a ranking or a claim that the films use it in identical ways.
How did Motwane shoot CTRL?
Motwane said the team began with a two-day mock shoot using stand-in actors to test whether both the story and the practical setup would work. “We first did a two-day mock shoot with stand-in actors,” he told Scroll. He reported that principal photography took 16 days and post-production took 16 months; these are his interview-reported figures.
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The team built the digital world from scratch, including the videos Nella sees and their interfaces, comments and likes. Motwane described a hybrid process combining live performance with screen capture and visual effects. In his account, Zoom served as an interface; the actor playing Allen worked in another room with a motion-capture camera; and that camera fed into Unreal Engine, where Allen’s face was created with MetaHuman. The result was brought into Nella’s laptop view.
Motwane described Nella’s laptop as the film’s “master image.” He said the filmmakers could control what appeared on the laptop to prompt the actors’ reactions, record footage and calls in 4K, and capture the laptop screen. He also recalled losing internet connectivity as one of the practical production problems. This is Motwane’s description of the workflow, not an independently verified technical specification.
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What does CTRL say about AI, privacy and social media?
Motwane said the story began closer to a conventional revenge plot. Conversations about AI shifted the film toward questions of social media, data and privacy within a thriller. For him, loneliness is central, as is the question of whether people can live without social media.
“You can’t really blame the technology. It’s the people running the technology whom we need to question.”
That is Motwane’s stated position, not a neutral verdict on technology. In CTRL, the AI premise gives the filmmakers a way to dramatize questions about who controls digital systems and how people’s data and online lives are used.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Who made CTRL, and when was it released?
Netflix announced that CTRL would premiere on October 4, 2024, and credits Motwane as director and Avinash Sampath and Motwane as writers. Netflix’s announcement names Saffron and Andolan Films as production companies, Nikhil Dwivedi and Arya Menon as producers, and Sumukhi Suresh for dialogues. The official Netflix title page lists the film as a 2024 release. Netflix’s catalog and displayed ratings can vary by territory, so check the local listing for current availability.
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