Five years of Trapped: Vikramaditya Motwane's survival drama speaks volumes of Mumbai, even when confined to an apartment

It is not a coincidence that Shaurya, the protagonist of Vikramaditya Motwane’s Trapped, is a vegetarian [and presumably an upper-caste Hindu.]  

We learn this bit well into the second half of the film though — in a flashback where Shaurya [Rajkummar Rao] is on a date with her newly-made beau Noorie [Geetanjali Thapa]. The scene begins with him admitting that he does not eat meat, and ends on a note where Shaurya expresses his support towards the idea of a country-wide beef ban, saying, “It is not correct, no?"

A few days later, when he finds himself questioning the ideas of right and wrong, Shaurya realises it all becomes subjective and rather meaningless when things boil down to a point of life and death. It only takes him being trapped in an apartment on the 35th floor of a deserted high-rise to do so.

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Trapped, a rare survival drama that completes five years today on 17 March, is about that existential phase in our lives where we decide to challenge our prejudices and push our boundaries in order to survive — because that is what counts. All of us want to grow, but very few amongst us show the willingness to fight our own conditioning and rise above it. Shaurya initially seems to be one of us, a regular fallible middle-class entity with his own biases and limitations, before he turns out to be a notch above the ordinary.

It is only suitable that Trapped is set in Mumbai, a city romanticised and despised far beyond reasonable measures. Mumbai continues to remain that contradiction, eliciting both love and hate from us for different reasons — We cannot stay immune to its energies. The genius of Motwane lies in encapsulating the essence of what it means to pursue a life in this city of dreams [and nightmares], despite setting a large part of his narrative in a closed apartment.

In a harrowing visual, we frequently see Shaurya and the vast cityscape in the same frame — with Shaurya being able to see an entire city which, in turn, however, has no clue of his existence, let alone plight. As his shrieks drown out of energy, eventually withering into dead whimpers, the city’s response remains the same. It is the cacophony of its never-ending construction work and the violent honking automobiles that could drown out the loudest cries for help, let alone a cracking squeal.

In another sweet ironic stroke, the building’s watchman, we are told, is partially deaf and dedicates the rest of his hearing to endless radio sessions. One of my favourite moments of the film is when we get a long stay on Shaurya making back-breaking efforts merely to dismantle a TV and throw it down, hoping to get some attention. His gargantuan struggle is built painstakingly, only to end with a split-second moment of the sight of TV crashing – and then life goes back to normal, swamped in the horn-honking racket. The life of a single person in Mumbai, we learn here, is exactly like that — the sound of a 43-inch TV crashing down from 35 floors on a regular afternoon.

Shaurya is devastated by the hostility, but it was not his first time probably; he is just experiencing it now on a macro level. Prior to falling in love with Noorie, we see Shaurya share his humble abode with at least four other men. When Shaurya, in his hasty desperation to acquire a new flat so that he can convince Noorie to marry him, packs his bag and leaves, one of his flatmates lazily turns to him and asks where, before blankly going back to his TV. All of us who live in Mumbai are perfectly aware of their anonymity, and sometimes that is the charm of it — that you can do your own thing, and nobody will care two hoots. But therein, sometimes, lies the downside too — that literally nobody would even notice what you are up to. We are all charmed by the tall buildings, not realising that they also mean a greater degree of isolation. Trapped is about both the charms and the disillusionment of this city.  

Even before the main conflict kicks in, Motwane deftly keeps Mumbai alive. The film begins with a sweet meet-cute, with Shaurya finally managing to ask Noorie out, and they begin to meet, hold hands discreetly in a local train, the works – the mood is that of a dreamy romance, which is abruptly cut off the moment Shaurya brings Noorie to his flat and opens the door — to a visual of at least four other men spread out all over, the floor not even visible. The horrors of how Mumbai’s real-estate also tend to make a sub-human out of us is captured when a blunt house-broker, tired with Shaurya’s desperation search for an affordable, writes him off saying, “Then don’t get married.”

Trapped works on all levels. It hits you viscerally, with Motwane showcasing his excellent command of cinematic language to tell a story without using too many words [His sophomore film Lootera had prepared us for this]. It also works as a philosophical tale of loneliness and existentialism in modern society — also on a pure storytelling level. Co-written by Amit Doshi and Hardik Mehta along with Motwane, the narrative here proceeds with a visibly smooth arc and flow.

Shaurya’s first response, when he realises he is entrapped, is naturally panic and dread, and he does the first thing he can think of — giving parts of himself away, writing messages on a board using his blood, and flinging them away, hoping that it lands somewhere. The next big change arrives in the story when Shaurya loses out on running water out of his fear of the rat that sits in the kitchen. However, soon, somehow we see a more strategically optimistic Shaurya flinging pebbles at a terrace at least 100 feet away — this time, he seems to know what he is doing. From being fearful of a rat to making friends with it, taking your life lessons from a cockroach — Shaurya nearly goes back to pre-civilisation nature. Motwane treats those portions with a dollop of humour — building a mood of faux-thriller as Shaurya gears up to hunt his next pigeon, with the entire goal being ‘finding next source of nourishment.’ [There is even this absurd visual of Shaurya roasting a pigeon in open-fire style with the tall buildings overlooking in the background.]

Rajkummar Rao gives his everything to this role, delivering his career-best performance to date, keeping us immersed and invested in Shaurya’s tribulations as he deals with unfathomable levels of terror all by himself. This is the kind of film where your thoughts keep trailing off hauntingly towards “What would you do if you were there?” That is the kind of immersion Motwane manages here.

Over the last two years, Trapped has gone on to acquire a special significance. As we found ourselves isolated and lonely in the first COVID-19 wave, especially some of us migrant working professionals in the metropolitan cities, we found ourselves testing our limits, both in a functional and an emotional way.

What all is exactly needed for our survival? What keeps us going in life after all? We found ourselves questioning these things like never before.

And yet, despite all its bleakness, Trapped is eventually a story of hope, of the undefeated human spirit that is always looking for a way, sometimes surprising the body itself. The most memorable moment of the film is a happy one, in a narrative otherwise brimming with bleakness and dread – and it arrives when, out of the blue, it starts raining. While the rest of the city might take it for granted, it feels like a boon for our starving, hapless Shaurya. Suddenly, we forget all the hardships Shaurya had been undergoing up until then — he suddenly springs to life and he smiles and dances out of joy, excitedly looking for anything that could possibly be used as a water storage container. For that moment, it is about the joy of having found an improbable solution, and the need to make the most of it.  

Trapped, after all, is about that sliver of hope we manage to find time and again, giving ourselves reasons to live and battle it out, despite the hardest of circumstances.

BH Harsh is a film critic who spends most of his time watching movies and making notes, hoping to create, as Peggy Olsen put it, something of lasting value.

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