Logout movie review: Babil Khan’s solo act asks relevant questions, but is lost in improbability

In the middle of this race, Pratman’s cell phone vanishes. Shock and consternation ensue. How can one live even one second without their most favourite appendage? Losing a limb may be a better option. A girl’s disembodied voice comes through the speakers of his laptop excitedly: she is his biggest fan, and she knows where his phone is!

Relief is short-lived. That was just a ruse to get him to relax his guard, and what follows in the rest of the film is a cautionary tale which picks on all our collective anxieties and dread that our constant state of hyper-connection has unleashed upon the world.

Watch Logout movie trailer here:

What would we do if our dark secrets, which no one has access to except for our phones, are about to be made public? This film asks the questions other films have posed: we’re still reeling under the impact of the corrosive connection between carefully constructed socially-mediated images and self esteem in ‘Adolescence’.

When Pratman says, in so many words, ‘deal bhi jayegi aur relevance bhi’, we hear the desperation of the numbers of people who’ve made their internet selves their alter egos, and have lost sight of the distinction between the two. Those who spend their waking moments ‘live counting’ the uptick in their ‘followers’, hog-tied to the buffoonery expected of them every time they are on screen: are those real lives anymore?

The film’s theme is timely even though we’ve seen it being explored in recent films like CTRL, and Babil Khan deftly shifts gears to keep our attention. It could well be called a solo act as he is practically the only one we see; the other characters, including his excitable manager (Gandharv Dewan) and the obsessive fan SK (Nimisha Nair, doing some believable voice work) are off screen almost all the way through the film, barring a few scenes. The only other one who is visible is Rasika Dugal in a cameo, as Pratman’s sister, exasperated by his constant need for engagement-and-validation.

When the person behind the ‘I’m your number one fan’ (shades of Stephen King’s ‘Misery’?) is revealed, though, most of the tension is lost in improbability.

The ideas here are relevant, and some of the hypocrisies the film points to (Pratman endorses a veggie brand, but, gasp, loves his chicken IRL) are on-point. The film makes smart use of its self-aware lead–with his first-hand experience of being at the receiving end of trolls–while expanding on its premise, but forgets that ‘content creators’ banging on about ‘creation of content’ risk sounding like pedants.

Logout movie cast: Babil Khan, Nimisha Nair, Gandharv Dewan, Anisha Victor
Logout movie director: Amit Golani
Logout movie rating: 2.5 stars