Vikramaditya Motwane’s Trapped is about surviving abandonment in the city that devours

No, I’m not trapped like Shaurya (Rajkummar Rao) in a one-BHK. Not yet. But in a strangely different register, I am. Everything I do: work, writing, watching, happens within the same small orbit of my one-BHK. My days fold into each other, and I move through them alone: I cry alone, laugh alone, and sometimes, at odd hours, I let music pull me into a dance that no one will ever witness. You’d imagine this wouldn’t shake someone who survived the pandemic up close, who spent most of his bachelor years confined to a single room. Back then, solitude came with a promise stitched to it, that one day the door would open, and light would return. Here, the light arrives every day, sharp and unkind. It slants through the window, lands on my writing table, to dazzle and mute me until I have no other choice but to pull the curtains shut. But why Trapped? Why think of a man locked in a flat when I can still walk out, meet colleagues, sit through screenings, stand in crowds? Perhaps, because it isn’t the kind of loneliness that keeps you indoors. It’s the kind that travels with you. It is the kind that sits inside your ribs. It’s the kind that’s impossible to step away from.

Trapped is very much a film about Mumbai: a city teeming with people, yet offering no one to truly be with.

But even if you look strictly at the life lived indoors, just like Shaurya’s, there’s already so much in common. Just the idea of living in a flat that feels too large for one person, not because of space, but because of the emptiness you carry into it. Each day becomes a kind of survival drama disguised as routine. You sit before a tap, just like exasperated Shaurya, waiting for the exact second the water supply kicks in. You peer through shafts of light, through windows that frame other lives, and wonder, just like desperate Shaurya, if the people you watch from a distance carry the same sense of abandonment you do. You get suddenly excited, just like animated Shaurya, the moment somebody far away from your balcony glances at you for that one brief second. There are afternoons spent lying on the bed, staring at the floor, just like sleepy Shaurya, watching a small cockroach trace its private path across the tiles. There are evenings spent sitting on the sofa, just like melancholic Shaurya, gazing at the city lights falling on the windowpane, almost inducing you to talk to yourself.

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These are trivial problems, privileged ones, in fact. But that was also Motwane’s point in Trapped: that even the most ordinary, banal details, such as a drop of water, a passing glance, an accidental contact between one human life and another, are what hold you together, and what, in their absence, trap you. There are multiple ways you can read Shaurya getting locked up in his own house. The metaphors are endless. Perhaps even one of them was for Motwane himself, who must have felt trapped in his own ambition, with Trapped arriving years after the brilliance of Lootera. Like Shaurya staring out from that balcony, perhaps he too watched other filmmakers go about making their films while he remained stuck with himself, waiting to find a way out. It was, perhaps, a stand-in for all the voices going on inside his own head as he was left alone. After all, Shaurya’s story was never about loneliness; it was about abandonment. It wasn’t just about being trapped, but perhaps about being lost in a city that can’t wait to swallow him. It was about what happens when you are left all alone, whom do you listen to then? That is why his desperate attempts to place a phone call, again and again, never connecting, symbolize something I know too well: my own attempts to video call anyone I care about, just to see a familiar face for a moment. I’ve always wanted to be in Bombay. But I have never wanted to be alone.