Thriller

Trapped

Cast: Rajkummar Rao, Geetanjali Thapa, Yogendra Vikram Singh
Director: Vikramaditya Motwane
Genre: Thriller
Play time: 01:40:00
release Year: 2017

Synopsis:

Rajkummar Rao is literally eating a dead pigeon raw with his bare hands while crying on a dirty high-rise balcony because he's been locked inside a brand new empty apartment for weeks without any food or water. Trapped is wild. It's unlike so many other mainstream bollywood movies because it completely strips away the singing and dancing to focus purely on one guy suffering through a nightmare. Shaurya, played by Rajkummar, just wants to marry his office colleague Noorie, played by Geetanjali Thapa, and they need a place to live in Mumbai immediately. He sneaks her into a newly constructed, totally unoccupied high-rise building called Swarnim and shows her an empty flat on the thirty-fifth floor. They plan to elope that very evening. He goes back to the flat early to do a few quick chores, locking the security door behind him. He pulls the handle. It clicks. The deadbolt jams instantly. He's trapped. Just like that. No phone signal, no electricity, no running water, and no people because the rest of the massive skyscraper is completely uninhabited and empty. It's terrifying. Stuff happens so fast in the beginning that you barely realize he's stuck for good until he starts banging on the metal door and screaming for help into the empty hallway. Nobody answers. He misses his own wedding at the registry office. Noorie waits there for hours, heartbroken, totally confused, and crying her eyes out while Shaurya is losing his absolute mind thirty-five floors up. Honestly, the pacing right here is so frantic. He spends days trying every single tool he can find in his little bag, using a screwdriver on the hinges, smashing the peephole, throwing a heavy stool at the glass balcony door, which surprisingly doesn't even shatter because of thick modern glass. And then boom, we hit the interval point right when he manages to throw a makeshift SOS sign made of bedsheets over the balcony railing, hoping someone down below in the bustling city will look up and see it, but nobody does because Mumbai is too busy and nobody looks up at empty buildings. God, the middle portion of Trapped is just pure psychological torture disguised as a survival thriller. Shaurya is wearing this awful, crumpled button-down shirt that gets progressively more disgusting and sweat-stained as the days drag on. He tries to catch rainwater on pieces of plastic. He drinks his own sweat. He finds a pigeon trapped on his balcony and manages to catch it, and that's when he eats the raw meat because he's literally starving to death. Yogendra Vikram Singh pops up briefly as a shady character later on when Shaurya finally manages to jury-rig a broken landline wire out the window to make a muffled, desperate call to the outside world, but everything falls apart so quickly. It's honestly exhausting to watch. He gets delirious. He hallucinates. He talks to himself. Hindi movies don't usually do minimalism like this, but this film commits fully to the claustrophobia. He sets fire to some trash on the balcony hoping to create smoke signals, which actually works to alert someone, but the fire almost kills him and burns the apartment curtains. He's losing teeth. He's bleeding from cuts. He looks like a skeleton. And then, after what feels like an eternity of agonizing isolation, some maintenance workers finally open the jammed door from the outside, finding him collapsed on the floor half-dead. He wakes up in a hospital bed with Noorie sitting right beside him, but everything is totally ruined and broken between them because she's married someone else now out of pure shock and parental pressure during his mysterious disappearance. He walks out of the hospital back into the chaotic streets of Mumbai, completely changed and haunted by the silence of that room. He goes back to the abandoned building, walks all the way up the stairs to the thirty-fifth floor, inserts his own key into the jammed lock, turns it, pushes the door open, steps inside the empty apartment, and closes the door behind him.

Movie Review:

There is a specific sound a heavy iron-mesh apartment door makes when it latches from the outside, and if I'm honest, that particular audio cue haunted my kitchen for days after I saw Trapped. Not great, not bad, just there, hanging in the back of my head while I waited for water to boil. Most Bollywood movies would have given that latch a dramatic musical sting or pushed the camera in with a nauseating lens shudder to tell you right away that things were about to go pear-shaped. Vikramaditya Motwane doesn't bother with that. He just lets Shaurya walk into a vacant high-rise flat in a newly minted Mumbai mega-complex that nobody has moved into yet, lets him lock himself out while checking the balcony, and leaves him stranded on the fourteenth floor without water, power, electricity, or even a working cell phone connection that isn't dropping every three syllables.

Shaurya is played by Rajkummar Rao, an actor who has spent the last decade making desperation look entirely unglamorous and painfully ordinary. When he first realizes he cannot get back down to the street, his panic is coated in a very specific modern middle-class idiocy—he thinks someone will surely come by to fix the cable, or management will send a guard up, or his girlfriend Noorie, played by Geetanjali Thapa with a quiet, grounded exhaustion, will figure out where he vanished to. That waiting period forms the longest stretch of the film's middle hour, and it is where the screenplay by Amit Joshi, Hardik Mehta, and Madhukar Verma takes its biggest risks. They refuse to give him a clever MacGyver montage right away. Instead, he just sits on the floor, tries to smash a deadbolt with a shoe, screams until his throat feels like sandpaper, and slowly realizes that nobody in this vast concrete hive cares if he yells until his lungs collapse.

The cinematography by Siddharth Diwan deserves a specific kind of praise that usually gets lost in discussions about physical acting endurance. He shoots those empty hallways and dust-flecked rooms with a cool, flat daylight that refuses to grant the apartment any gothic atmosphere. It is just a box of walls. It’s a box with a view of other boxes that are equally empty. The sound design fills in whatever lighting misses, tracking the distant thrum of traffic far below, the irritating hum of a neon tube that someone left burning on another floor, and the dry, clicking scrape of fingernails against wallpaper. There is a pigeon that gets trapped inside with Shaurya for a while, and the frantic flapping of its wings against the glass is edited with a patience that lets you feel the rising claustrophobia without cutting away to safety every five seconds. It's a small thing, but it bugged me how the film used the exact same Foley sound for a bottle cap twisting off three separate times across forty minutes, but that is the kind of nitpick you only indulge in when a movie is holding your attention tightly enough that you start staring at the texture of the plaster.

Nobody else in Hindi cinema could pull off the middle forty minutes of this thing quite like Rao. He doesn't have the broad physical bulk of a traditional action hero, which makes his eventual starvation and muscle wasting look entirely plausible rather than like a gym-built actor wearing theatrical makeup. He eats a dead pigeon raw at one point, and the scene is shot from across the room in a wide medium shot that gives you no emotional out. You just watch a man who has forgotten how to be anything other than an animal with a stomach ache. It recalls the cold, procedural desperation of something like Robert Bresson's A Man Escaped, though stripped of that film's intellectual rigor and replaced with the desperate hustle of a guy who just wanted to elope with his girlfriend to a flat in Malad.

The social critique underneath all the physical endurance running is rarely stated out loud, which saves the film from becoming a boring lecture about urban isolation. The city outside his window is an endless grid of scaffolding, cranes, and half-finished skyscrapers paid for by corrupt builders and inhabited by ghosts who bought on installment plans. Shaurya is a cog in a call center, a guy who sells mobile connections to people who probably hate him, and his entire life before the door locked was already a series of temporary fixes and bad signal drops. When he finally escapes—and I am not spoiling the exact logistics of how he gets out because the mechanics of his exit are messy and pathetic rather than triumphant—you don't feel like he has beaten the system. You feel like he managed to crawl out of a drainpipe just in time to catch a local train that smells like stale sweat and wet cement.

The supporting cast gets very little screen time because the entire mechanism of the narrative is designed to suffocate any secondary character interaction, but Yogendra Vikram Singh pops up briefly as a cynical brother-in-law, and his brief scene has that slightly over-dubbed studio flatness that plagues a lot of mid-budget productions where the sound had to be completely replaced in post. It’s an aesthetic bump in the road, but it also reminds you how manufactured these stories usually are before Motwane strips the gloss away. Trapped isn't interested in making you feel good about human resilience or the indomitable spirit of Mumbai. It just leaves you staring at a guy chewing on raw meat in an empty room, wondering why he didn't check the lock before he stepped outside.