Title: Logout

Director: Amit Golani

Cast: Babil Khan, Gandharv Dewan, Nimisha Nair, Rashika Duggal

Where: Streaming on ZEE5

Rating: HHH

Troy Ribeiro

In an age where dopamine comes in 15-second reels and self-worth is measured in double taps, Logout drags us, kicking and doomscrolling, into the cesspool of digital obsession. Beginning with the ominously clever line defining the mobile phone— “It’s a prison designed for your mind and it has over 

7 billion prisoners. That’s the reason it’s called a cell phone”—the film quickly establishes that it isn’t here to stroke your screen-scrolling ego. It’s here to slap your Wi-Fi-dependent soul awake.

Director Amit Golani’s vision takes the form of an eerie, techno-thriller where the hunter becomes the haunted—quite literally. A man in disguise, trying to orchestrate a scare, is killed instead, setting the tone for a world where performance meets peril.

The plot clicks into gear when Pratyush, a viral content czar operating under the pseudonym “Pratman” and played with vulnerable verve by Babil Khan, has his digital life hacked by an obsessive fan. With his identity stolen, his privacy violated, and his curated perfection upended, Pratyush spirals into a psychological vortex that feels eerily relatable in our swipe-right culture.

Babil Khan is the film’s spine, meat, and marrow. He oscillates between brash digital confidence and collapsing real-world insecurity with the kind of raw earnestness that keeps you watching even when the plot occasionally clicks on auto-pilot. His monologue—“We don’t look into our phones, we live through our phones… but the people around us don’t understand this”—is less a line and more a dirge for an entire generation’s emotional bandwidth.

In a clever metaphor, a mouse caught in the kitchen parallels Pratman’s captivity—both physical and digital. The film is peppered with such visual wit but doesn’t always go the distance with its commentary. For all its ambition, Logout often tiptoes around the deeper psychological terrain it hints at, offering more tension than insight. The finale borrows from horror-thriller conventions, complete with a deranged fan’s derailed dreams of the limelight, but doesn’t quite stick the landing in terms of emotional catharsis.

Nimisha Nair plays the stalker, Sakshi, with unsettling precision, though her character feels like a vessel for thematic delivery rather than a fully fleshed persona. Her line—“I want you to notice me”—echoes the very cry of the algorithm-warped generation. Rashika Duggal pops in briefly as the sister, offering a faint glimmer of familial grounding in an otherwise hyper-digital chaos.

Stylistically, the film earns points for being set entirely on computer screens, in a genre now fondly called the “screenlife thriller.” It’s a risky format, but when done right— it can amplify claustrophobia and urgency. The film largely pulls it off, keeping viewers locked into Pratyush’s POV as he descends from influencer heaven into tech-hell.

Yes, the film is flawed—it flirts with depth more than it dives—but it’s also a telling snapshot of a society too busy livestreaming its breakdown to notice it happening. A cautionary tale dressed up as a psychological thriller, it may not have the sharpest claws, but it knows exactly where to scratch.