Firstly, profuse apology for a monumental screw-up — i.e. typo in the name of the director of Stolen; (Karan) Tejpal gone as Tyagi, in the paper’s print edition (change made online). That said, taut is a peculiar adjective. It means tight, of course. Somehow, I’ve never seen it used in any other context — say, relationships, shoelaces, pants, comic-routines… The word only goes with films, for some reason — specifically, when you call a thriller, a “taut thriller”! And that’s precisely the description I inevitably come across, among critics/content-creators, to do with the film Stolen (@PrimeVideoIN): co-written, directed by debutant, @karantejpal94; co-written, produced by @gd24380. It’s set over a night in the boondocks of, presumably, Haryana/Rajasthan, with three leads: an impoverished woman (@mia_maelzer ), whose child got stolen, while she was asleep on a railway platform; an affluent bloke (Shubham Vardhan), who was then on that platform; and his brother (@nowitsabhi), who’s come down to pick him up from the mofussil railway station, in the dead of the night. This triggers off a series of wholly unpredictable events/incidences, unwittingly involving those two urban dudes, who were merely on their way to their mom’s destination-wedding. How do you arrive at a taut thriller, so to say? I suppose, foremost, by trimming all the fat from the screenplay — that rarely, if ever, segues into detailed backstories, forget flashbacks for concerned concerned. Viewer must join dots. Attention mustn’t waver. Plot’s the point. So, for instance, while you can figure the underprivileged girl Jhumpa in the film is possibly a tribal; in a scene, she mentions Bonbini, who’s the guardian spirit of Sunderbans, spanning southern Bangladesh and West Bengal. I ask director Tejpal, producer Dhingra, where she’s from? Column👇🏽link in bio.