Logout Review: Babil Khan Keeps You Logged In
Sneha Jaiswal (Twitter | Instagram)
Most people who lose a hand or arm in war experience a strange sensation of pain in the limb that no longer exists in their body. It’s called phantom limb syndrome. And now, some people experience a strange sensation that their hand is missing something – their phone. We are so addicted to our phones that they feel like an extended phantom part of our body. The 2025 Bollywood movie Logout explores what happens to a big social media influencer when he loses his phone after a night of heavy partying. It’s like losing half his heart. What’s worse? He is blackmailed by an obsessive fan who now possesses his dearest possession.
Created by Amit Golani (director) and Biswapati Sarkar (writer), Logout starts off by introducing Babil Khan as protagonist Pratyush Dua, famously known as content creator ‘Pratman’ online. Pratyush eats, poops, and breathes with his phone, and is desperate to hit 10 million followers to clinch a crucial brand deal. So, losing his phone causes him excessive anxiety and pretty much knocks him off his senses, mostly because he cannot post his next video. This is a thriller for viewers, and a horror story for Pratyush.
The first 30 minutes of Log Out are entertaining, setting up Pratyush’s world as an attention-hungry content creator who simply cannot stay away from his phone. He will almost do anything it takes to ‘trend’ or go ‘viral’: pretend to be vegan, trap a rat, create fake IDs to bully rivals, lie about his exes, but funnily draws the line at a ‘chaddi dikhake naacho’ type of challenge (an online dancing trend where users twerk while showing off their underwear). Like Ananya Panday’s techno-thriller CTRL, which featured a very limited cast, Logout also focuses solely on Babil Khan’s Pratyush, leaving no room for secondary character distractions. However, while CTRL pits Ananya against an AI adversary, Pratyush faces a malevolent human.
Nimisha Nair voices the faceless fan who gets hold of Pratyush’s phone and then blackmails him over its content. The primary focus of the story is thus on Pratyush’s attempts to trace the girl and get back his phone. But what makes Logout a little unbelievable after the first half hour is the fact that Pratyush voluntarily allows access to his phone to an unknown person, all for an OTP to pay the transport fee for the phone. Really?
His narcissistic, attention-seeking personality aside, Pratyush shows so much quick wit through the rest of the story that this one act makes no sense at all. He has access to his laptop, he can call tons of people to help him pay. Since he is Gen Z, he’s probably not friends with his neighbours, but he could simply call his security guard, a nice dude who even sets up a mousetrap in his home a few scenes earlier. Since the script moves forward with the fan gaining access to the phone, all the writers had to do was make the phone-thief crack the password themselves. The guy’s so self-centred, his birth date as a password wouldn’t surprise any viewer.
Anyway, at 1 hour 48 minutes, the second half of Log Out begins to feel dragged out, but Babil Khan’s performance keeps you around to find out the fate of Pratyush’s phone. The ending gets uncannily emotional, slipping in some good old gyaan about respecting your elders and not losing your mind over online fame. Overall, it’s an interesting cautionary tale against online narcissism and unhealthy addiction to social media and content creators.
Rating: 3 out of 5. Watch Logout on Zee5.
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