Trama

Nella and Joe are the perfect influencer couple, but when he cheats on her, she turns to an AI app to erase him from her life - until it takes control.

CTRL (the keyboard shortcut for control) revolves around a couple Nella (Ananya Panday) and Joe (Vihaan Samat), who meet as teenagers and hit it off. The cute relationship wins over the internet, and both turn influencers, vlogging important moments from their daily lives. It soon becomes almost a transactional relationship, where earning money gains a lot of importance. Until one day Nella accidentally livestreams Joe cheating on her and breaks up with him. She is advised by a follower to use the CTRL app and erase Joe forever from her life. CTRL is an AI assistant, who promises to remove all digital footprint of Joe. As the process might take a longer time, the app innocuously asks for permission to gain administrative control over her computer. Things (of course) go south immediately.

Joe and Nella met at a game in 1st year of college and started dating. Bina (Devika Vatsa) is Nella's best friend. They ran a digital channel called "Njoy" to promote brands while they did fun things together. They entire dating history together is on social media. Nella and Joe have been together for 5 years now. Nella catches Joe cheating on her on their 5th anniversary. The whole thing was live-streamed by Nella as she wanted to surprise Joe, but it goes terribly wrong, and Nella ends up being trolled on social media. Joe calls Nella and admonishes her that everything in her life is about social media likes and how to promote brands. Nella used to earn good money from NJoy, but Joe did all the back-end work on that. Without Joe, Njoy was dead, and Nella was out of an income source.

Joe's (Vihaan Samat) been secretly active in this group of tech-heads who've been planning a take-down of Mantra Unlimited, a corporation that's caught every segment of the national consumer market at the ends of its strings and wishes to puppet them according to their whims.

Nalini "Nella" Awasthi (Ananya Panday) was thriving after dumping Joe for cheating on her, erasing his digital memory from her past with the CTRL AI. In her account on CTRL, Nella created an avatar, whom she named Allen and Allen was to be her personal AI assistant. Allen had helped Nella erase Joe from 149,881 photos and 19,655 videos. Gradually, Nella gave Allen administrative access to her computer. When Nella was asleep, her computer was accessed remotely and search for files on Project Unicorn and Mantra Unlimited. It was Allen who had helped relaunch Nella on social media. Nella quickly becomes the face of high-paying brands who followed after she'd agreed to represent CTRL. CTRL was paying Nella Rs 2.5 Crores to represent them. Joe had called her and even come to her apartment to meet her, but Nella shuts him out and refuses to listen to what he has to say. When Joe texts her on WhatsApp, CTRL responds to Joe on her behalf and deletes the chat history.

But Nella wasn't a sell-out. So, when Joe goes missing, under mysterious circumstances, and a whole archive of evidence turns up against Mantra Unlimited, Nella's decides to act.

No one was willing to help Nella in her haphazard search through the mess Joe had gotten embroiled in until she put the hard feelings about talking to the "other woman" on the back burner. She got in touch with Shonali (Kamakshi Bhat), Joe's coworker and the girl he'd made out with, and that's where she got the names of the people who were just as eager to bust the whole scheme wide open.

Nella wasn't immediately convinced by Shonali's claim that a righteous whistle-blower data analyst named Karan from Mantra Unlimited was willing to hand Joe the evidence of the scam they were planning under Project Unicorn. But she figured that with Joe missing, it was worth looking into. Nella had access to Joe's laptop which was left behind with her after the breakup. A rigorous string of online breaking-and-entering and a chat with Mayank, the journalist who was trying to unmask Mantra, got Nella the information that she needed. From the chat she got a link to an online Dropbox, but the data on that was encrypted.

Before Nella could even digest the fact that Mantra had the whistle-blower killed and staged it as a robbery-turned-homicide, Joe turned up dead. Joe's body was found on a ferry. It was clear that Mantra Unlimited would do anything to keep the truth from coming out, and that includes murder. Mayank had already given her the decryption code to the folder that Joe had gotten from Karan, the mole in the company. When she breaks into it, what she finds is a video that Joe had made before he was killed. What Joe had to say in that video would've definitely thrown a wrench in Mantra's evil scheme of tricking people into opening up the vault of their personal information.

Mantra Unlimited was using the CTRL AI to get illegal access to people's systems by sneakily slipping it into the terms and conditions that people never read. Earlier, a heartbroken Nella clicked on the agree button without a second thought when what was promised was the erasure of her trigger. Her system was broken into when she wasn't even looking. Nella looked at the settings of CTRL and realized that it was a Mantra product. Joe said that Mantra could use and video of the user to create deep-fakes. She rushed to log out after hearing Joe spill the truth about the AI, but by now, the AI's given Mantra everything that they need to frame Nella for Joe's murder. Aryan K the CEO of Mantra had been arrested for insider trading in the US.

When they first accessed her system, they looked up "Project Unicorn" the name of the mass mind control project that Joe's group was after. They didn't find anything because Joe had never told Nella about that side of his work. But when a fearless Nella is about to upload Joe's explosive video, Mantra hacks into her home security system to distract her with false notifications about someone at her door. While Nella's away, they edit Joe's video to make it sound like he's accusing Nella of acting unhinged and plotting his murder.

That's exactly the kind of thing that Joe was trying to warn people about in his video. Nella's life and career are done for. Mantra's been laying their base and fortifying their defense the whole time. To the world that is now fully immersed in the ban-Nella outrage, it now looks like Nella had met Joe on the ferry where his body was found.

Sensational news reports and the social media witch-hunt don't give a hoot about Nella's side of the story. Jealousy and admiration go hand-in-hand in the line of work Nella was in. It gives people almost a ghoulish satisfaction to watch a picture-perfect life fall to pieces. Mantra Unlimited's very expensive lawyer laid down her options for her. Since her contract with Mantra deprived her of the right to ever sue the company and Nella neither had the money nor the support that she needed to bring the case to court, she was bound to lose the fight.

There was no way Nella could've fought them in court. Mantra Unlimited controlled all the avenues of the law and their CEO Aryan K (Ravish Desai) proved that he didn't have an ethical bone in his body. The fact that he'd been arrested for insider trading and after wrapping all that up, come back to India to run his elaborate scam is proof enough that he knows what he's doing. And he shows how low he's willing to stoop to rule the country's economy and make bank when he manipulates the circumstances of Nella's arrest to peddle another invasive app to the public. He's now entering the business of getting access to people's dirty laundry through a mental health app and telling them what to do with their lives.

Nella took the deal. She drops all the charges against Mantra and, in return, they give her a clean slate, at least digitally. In the midst of all the stereotyping and meaningless hate that Influencers receive just for existing and doing something that brings them joy, CTRL tables the tale of Nella in a way that celebrates all the work she put into her life, and her perseverance comes through even in a scenario where she loses everything that she built. When it counted, Nella sacrificed her image and her career to fight against a grave threat to public safety. But a fight like that comes with a tall cost, and Nella lost more than her career.

Now living at her parents' house and working at her dad's bakery, Nella's forced to be friends with a reality that she never wanted. People who tend to opt for virtue-signaling in such circumstances will find her ungrateful for being so unhappy. Loneliness was what first got her to lean on an AI for emotional comfort.

Allen's (Aparshakti Khurana) avatar is replaced with Joe's, and hearing Joe's voice, even though it's not really his voice, cradles her broken heart with the kind of comfort she is familiar with. Nella practically grew up with Joe. After her parents, he was the closest thing she had to family. Despite how it ended, there were things that Joe did for Nella that couldn't have been fake. So in the battle of all the different kinds of pain she's felt in a very small time-frame, her grief takes precedence. Everything else, even the fact that she's going back to the same AI that's destroyed her life, loses meaning when faced with the extent of her grief. That's what she's trying to work on before anything else.