'AFTER THE SCENE, HE BROKE DOWN AND WEPT'

The entire shoot paused after that. There was a heaviness on set -- a shared recognition of the horror we were portraying.

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Amazon Prime Video's Stolen has been getting raves. Vikramaditya Motwane, one of Bollywood's ace directors, who has made films like CTRL, Trapped, Lootera and Udaan, called it ‘India’s best action thriller of the decade, if not longer’. “The story of the Bansal brothers grew from that moment, where two young men got brutally killed by a mob that mistakenly believed they were child kidnappers. They are driven by panic, misinformation and manipulated videos circulating rapidly on WhatsApp,” Stolen’s debutant director Karan Tejpal tells. “That tragedy became the seed for the film's narrative and emotional terrain.”

Where did you get the idea for Stolen?

The idea began with a video I saw of the 2018 Karbi Anglong lynching in Assam.

It left a knot of fear in my stomach -- a visceral, physical reaction I couldn't shake. I felt disturbed, and the only way I knew to process that feeling was to write. The story of the Bansal brothers grew from that moment, where two young men get brutally killed by a mob that mistakenly believed they were child kidnappers. They are driven by panic, misinformation and manipulated videos circulating rapidly on WhatsApp. That tragedy became the seed for the film’s narrative and emotional terrain.

How much research did you do on mob lynchings?

I began researching what is known as ‘WhatsApp lynchings’. I uncovered the broader, more unsettling social crisis behind the incident. On one side, there is the collective fear within disempowered communities to protect their children. On the other, the unimaginable grief of parents whose children become victims of that fear. It exposed a chilling cycle of mistrust, desperation and systemic failure. Each element of the story -- child trafficking, vigilante justice, the breakdown of law enforcement and the manipulation of truth -- is a reflection of a different facet of the larger phenomenon that led to that lynching.