CTRL movie ending explained: Vikramaditya Motwane, Ananya Panday's AI thriller on Netflix is a cautionary tale for our times

Ananya Panday as social media influencer Nella Awasthi in Vikramaditya Motwane's 'CTRL', streaming on Netflix. (Image [cropped] via Instagram)

Riveting as it is, director Vikramaditya Motwane's artificial-intelligence-and-data-privacy thriller, starring Ananya Panday as Nalini 'Nella' Awasthi and Vihaan Samant as Joe Mascarenhas, could never have had a happy ending. This much is evident from the start of the 100-minute film that dropped on Netflix on October 4.

The story starts with a social media influencer couple who have lakhs of followers and garner thousands of views per video by posting about their relationship for close to five years, and ends with a crime and a massive coverup as the relationship goes sour.

Without giving away more than you can see in the trailer then, Nella and Joy run a YouTube-like channel called NJoy. When Nella catches Joe kissing someone else on a livestream, both their online and offline lives come undone. Nella wants nothing to do with Joe, and in what feels like a partial throwback to the 2004 Hollywood film 'Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind', resolves to "erase" Joe from her digital life and "Del" her "pain". To do this, she hands over control to an app that ironically offers to let people "Take CTRL", and unwittingly signs over more rights to the app admin than she realizes.

(Contains spoilers) Nella picks an AI avatar from a dropdown menu, selects his personality (flirty comedian) and then groans and shakes her head as the constantly buffering AI learns what she likes and what she doesn't. The AI identifies 1,49,881 images and 19,655 videos of Nella and Joe online, and offers to delete Joe in each over 90 days, 16 hours, 42 minutes, 22 seconds - this, roughly, is also the time frame in which the story unfolds.

Nella consents, and everything goes swimmingly with the AI editing her posts and videos. It also gets her new brand collaborations and influencer fees so she's now making crores of rupees. That is, everything goes swimmingly till the day Joe doesn't just disappear from her digital feed but also goes missing for real. As viewers, we see what the app admin is doing in the moments when Nella looks away.

Now, Motwane has shown us dystopian worlds before, in 'Sacred Games' and in 'Trapped'. In 'CTRL', he ventures into a new territory of social media feeds and digital privacy (a topic that is also very current): the search for virality, what AI can do for you, free online services with hidden costs that may not be monetary and what we are prepared to sign over for new fixes to old problems like heartbreak and social embarrassment. There is a video in which Joe explains how signing over rights to access free features without understanding the terms and conditions can leave people vulnerable to data theft and deepfakes - but that is best seen in the context of the film than repeated here as a pedagogical takeaway.

What is AIB's Tanmay Bhat doing in CTRL?

Writers Vikramaditya Motwane, Avinash Sampath and Sumukhi Suresh do a good job of connecting the social media world as it is today, and what could happen if apps like CTRL are allowed to proliferate without regulatory checks. To this end, the film works in social media influencers like All India Bakchod (AIB) who are shown discussing Nella and Joe's very public breakup. They also write in memes and comic songs using footage of Nella and Joe that's already online. As a cautionary tale about the dangers of sharing your life online and signing over privacy rights, Motwane's Netflix thriller is on-point and adequately scary.

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Since her role in 'Gehraiyaan' (2022), Ananya Panday has also been periodically picking films and series about the Gen Z experience - sample 'Kho Gaye Hum Kahaan' or even 'Call Me Bae', where her newly poor character Bella uses her social-media and luxury-market smarts to land a job and expose a scandal in a shenanigans-filled series about taking down a power-hungry corporate and a TRP-crazy journalist.

In 'CTRL', Panday embodies the social media influencer who measures her worth in likes and brand collabs, until reality comes crashing out of her online excesses to send her to the one place she didn't want to go. In the end, Nella seeks the boyfriend she was so keen to wipe out of her digital life in the same AI app that's at the root of the problem, and from which Nella can no longer escape.