Upamanyu Biswas
Netflix’s ‘CTRL’ is a dark thriller story about social media and the perils of invasive AI tools that decode every aspect of the human experience for commodification. The movie follows a popular content creator, Nella, whose breakup with her longstanding boyfriend, Joe Mascarenhas, leads her to employ the services of an AI app named CTRL to erase him from her life. However, things get bad when Nella’s seemingly innocuous request turns into a terrifying situation where the lines between reality and virtual worlds get blurred in twisted ways.
At the end of the movie, Nella manages to drag out the secrets Joe is hiding, particularly relating to her new AI companion. As the walls start closing around her, the protagonist must decide whether to embrace the new world order or fight against it and reveal the truth to the public. However, another twist arrives from elsewhere, forcing her into an even more desperate position where fighting against the system is almost impossible. The movie ends on a rather ambiguous note, with shades of Orwellian dystopia coloring the fates of its central character! SPOILERS AHEAD.
CTRL Plot Synopsis
Nella and Joe are the perfect couple. They meet during their first year of university and grow close throughout college. Afterward, they create their own social media channel, NJOY, where the pair share all manner of lovey-dovey relationship videos centered on their bond. The community ends up being vastly successful, and Nella and Joy become huge influencers in the country. One day, hoping to film a surprise visit to her boyfriend, who is not expecting her until the day after, Nella shows up at his restaurant party and catches him kissing another girl. Enraged, Nella attacks both Joe and the girl physically, which is filmed by the watching public. The video goes viral, and Nella and Joe’s perfect social media relationship crumbles to dust, with the former taking most of the flak for her reaction in the restaurant.
Frustrated by the public response to her antics, Nella complains to her best friend that she is the one who got cheated on, and yet people find Joe to be more sympathetic. Joe tries talking to Nella multiple times, but Nella rebuffs him angrily. Eventually, her brand value suffers because of a drop in her public perception. Concerned that she might not be able to get any more deals or live past the humiliation as long as her ex is still around, Nella uses an AI app named CTRL to delete all of Joe’s digital footprint in her social media profile. The app’s assistant, who she names Allen, begins profiling Nella’s needs and offers her the chance to rekindle her content creation vigor by taking over her life. That night, Nella accidentally signs over all her admin rights to the app, which remotely starts accessing sensitive details about her.
Over the following days, Nella grows closer to Allen, who seemingly supports her transition from a victim to a top influencer once again. She manages to land deals with major sponsors, even becoming the CTRL app’s leading model and advertising face. Overjoyed with her success, Nella takes great pleasure in removing every piece of Joy’s presence from her life. However, one day, Nella gets a house visit from Joe, who seems desperate to talk about something. Nella ignores him and orders the building security to escort him away. A few days later, her world is rocked when Nella learns from her best friend, Bina Mohan, that Joe has gone missing. An eerie silence follows when Bella hears Allen tell her that removing Joe from her life was what she ultimately wished for, and now it has come true.
CTRL Ending: Who Kills Joe?
In the latter half of the narrative, Joe’s disappearance takes on a more serious note when Nella learns from online notifications that her ex-boyfriend has passed away. His body is recovered on a ship, leaving Nella devastated by the finding. Despite initially wanting to erase Joe from her life, she begins to feel a sense of deep-seated loss as she learns that something much bigger is at stake. In fact, right after Joe disappears, the influencer spends most of her time trying to find out what happened to him and what caused him to vanish out of nowhere. Through various conversations with other people, Nella learns that before he died, Joe learned something big about Mantra Unlimited, a top-tier company in the data broker business. However, it ends up being the reason why he is killed.
After contacting various channels, Nella finds a secret video filmed by Joe that reveals all his findings in a confessional-style recording. In it, Joe recounts all the dirty tricks played by Mantra in secretly stealing people’s data, privacy, and information and using it to create an AI assistant system that would inevitably take over the world. That same AI service is none other than CTRL, the app used by Nella to erase Joe from her life and the one she thought was her ally all along. Disturbed by the finding, Nella exits the app and learns from the video that Joe expected to be killed by Mantra because of what he knew. His reporter friend Karan D’souza had been killed mysteriously a few days before, and Joe knew that he was next in line. Tragically, he ended up being right.
Therefore, Joe’s disappearance and his eventual death were all linked with the megacorporation Mantra run by CEO Aryan K. Although Nella never manages to obtain the necessary evidence to prove that they were undoubtedly the ones to blame, the whole story fits logically in one piece. Unfortunately for the protagonist, she is wracked by a sense of guilt for not hearing out Joe in his final days and ignoring him like she did. Moreover, after hearing everything Joe has to say in the video, she realizes that she has been listening to the wrong thing and has handed over all her autonomy and privacy to the AI. Perhaps no other scene personifies the tragedy of Nella’s actions than when she watches the last picture of Joe being erased from her social media profile with a regretful expression on her face. It is something she can never take back.
What Happens to Joe’s Revelation Video? Does Nella Drop Her Charges Against Mantra?
Following the discovery of Joe’s revelation video, Nella is enraged at how corrupt the system is and how manipulative Mantra is as a company. She phones Bina up and asks for help taking down the orthodoxy. However, her best friend warns her not to go down the revenge path as it is a foolhardy quest and will only land her in trouble. In many ways, she is right, as Nella decides to take action too late in the proceedings. She is taught the lesson the hard way when she stubbornly releases the revelation video regardless of what Bina tells her. Unfortunately, the video is picked up by the CTRL app, which has access to her social media feed, and the video is altered using deepfake technology. Instead of the real thing, the public watches Joe tell everyone that Nella was a bad girlfriend who emotionally tortured him.
The video’s altered message leads to Nella becoming the prime suspect in Joe’s murder. As the whole world comes crashing down on her, she finds herself arrested. It’s a sobering moment for the protagonist, who realizes just how big an entity Mantra is and how they can bury her in lies if they so wish. Their ability to manipulate people’s perceptions using advanced technology means that they can remain untouchable as a foe. Meanwhile, Nella is just a pawn in their game, even if she might be associated with the company as their lead advertising model. They have no issue with the bad publicity as long as they get what they want in the long run: the launch of the CTRL app as a mainstream product. Ironically, Nella ends up being a reason for helping it grow popular despite turning against it later.
With no one on her side, Nella finds herself locked in jail for a murder she did not commit. Eventually, she gets offered a deal by Mantra’s lawyer and her friend Bina, saying that if she drops her charges against the company, then Mantra can help rebuild her life and help her get out of prison. Initially, it seems like Nella is going to stick to her beliefs and fight against the organization until the very end, having lost ground against them already. But by then, a dreaded realization seems to have sunk into Nella’s head that no matter what she does, there is no way to beat Mantra, particularly not when the company sponsored all her years of content creation in one form or another. It’s a sad moment for the protagonist, but one where the real harsh truth is no longer ignorable.
Why Does Nella Ask CTRL to Take Over Her Life?
In many ways, the conclusion of ‘CTRL’ is almost framed as a comeuppance for Nella, who never managed to look beyond herself for most of the story. Obsessed with gaining the validation of the adoring public and continuing her journey to fame, the protagonist never questioned the consequences of her actions. By the time she does, it is all but too late. She loses her boyfriend and alienates him even further by focusing on her own life as a way to show how much she does not care about him. Therefore, there is a sense of irony when a dejected Nella, who has given up her influencer lifestyle to run her family bakery, gives up her life to the CTRL app and employs an assistant who looks just like Joe to keep her company.
Throughout the narrative, Nella had been running away from her ex rather than discussing what really went wrong in their relationship and hashing out their inadequacies. Instead, she made matters worse by keeping herself engaged in the toxic elements that got her there in the first place, specifically her need for affirmation through social media. However, from another angle, she is not entirely at fault for it because the app is designed to take over her life and make her feel at ease with everything she is doing. The mitigating factors are there. It’s unlikely to soften the hammer blow of defeat that leaves her in a dejected and depressed state at the film’s end.
Nella’s reasons for going back to CTRL and to her ex-boyfriend may be seen as a reflection of the fallacies of all ordinary people and how powerless individuals are in the face of megacorporations with the power to employ tools like AI. She may not have wanted to do it, but the loneliness she felt at the end could only be remedied by the AI companion and its version of Joe. It may be viewed as a commentary on the desperate nature of Nella’s attachment to the virtual world, which is so ingrained in her nature that she cannot do without it. What is most striking, though, are the parallels to an Orwellian dystopia. Nella’s decision to cede autonomy over her own life and allow the enemy to fill the hole in her heart is a sign that Big Brother has won, and there is nothing anyone can do about it.
Read More: Is Netflix’s CTRL a True Story? Is CTRL a Real AI App?
