A common joke goes: ‘I always accept cookies, but I never seem to get any.’

We are an Internet-using generation that rarely spares a second thought when it comes to ‘auto-filling’ our personal details on any website, we quickly scroll down to tick the box at the end of a long list of terms and conditions that we never bother to read and accept the aforementioned cookies without batting an eyelid. No matter how much we make our social media profiles private, nothing about us is private anymore.

You chat with a friend about wanting to buy a product and you find yourself bombarded with ads of that product on every site you visit. Your private information, preferences, Internet usage history is public knowledge, being bought and sold by brands without you being none the wiser. You think you are in control. But are you, really?

CTRL tells you that you are not. Streaming on Netflix and playing out over a crisp 99 minutes, CTRL takes the viewer into the world of artificial intelligence, deep-fake, algorithm, data mining, bots and more, through the upheaval caused in the lives of two social media influencers.

When we meet them, Nalini ‘Nella’ Awasthi (Ananya Panday) and Joe Mascarenhas (Vihaan Samat) are an influencer couple whose channel known as ‘NJOY’ is a rage and is raking in big bucks. Every moment is a fashioned-for-Instagram-likes ‘meet cute’ moment for the two. Their fans love it, Nella and Joe revel in it. So who is complaining?

Till they have an ugly breakup — which, of course, is an ‘event’ that is streamed live on the Internet. Floundering at first, Nella finds her groove, with quite a bit of help from her newfound AI ‘friend’ named Allen (Nella in reverse is Allen). Allen looks like Ranveer Singh from Band Baaja Baaraat and is voiced by Aparshakti Khurana. But that is the least creepy thing about ‘him’. As Allen gradually takes control of a lonely Nella’s life, her career starts to flourish more than ever. But she is unaware that she has signed up to lose more than what she gains from this process.

Directed by Vikramaditya Motwane — the man who has delivered content as diverse as Udaan and Lootera, Sacred Games and Jubilee, Trapped and AK vs AK — CTRL is a mirror to and reflection of the times we live in. It is built within the genre of a screen-life thriller — which means we are seeing most of what unfolds on screen through a, well, screen. Phones, laptops, CCTVs, news cameras — there is a screen out there everywhere, and there is no escaping being on one and looking at one.

The first 30 minutes of CTRL is mostly fun ’n’ games, showing us #theinfluencerlife as we see it nowadays. Ananya, growing as an actor with every part, plunges herself into the role and gives us a peek into her comedic skills, especially when we get to see Nella and Joe’s laugh-out-loud antics in order to bring in likes, shares and subscribers.

But CTRL quickly turns pretty dark — you can call it Black Mirror-lite — with murder (actually, more than one) making its way into the mix. All of it comes down to illegal data selling and how our personal information is being unscrupulously peddled. It is to Motwane and co-writers Avinash Sampath and Sumukhi Suresh’s credit that even as we are thrown into a world that we are all affected by but are only superficially aware of, they don’t make the film difficult for the average viewer to comprehend.

As has been seen in films of this genre — Searching and Unfriended come to the top of one’s mind — CTRL keeps it tight when it comes to its players, with Ananya and Vihaan — who were recently seen together in Call Me Bae — dominating screen space. The film benefits from what the two bring to it, collectively and individually. The other plus factors are Sneha Khanwalkar’s music and the camerawork by Pratik Shah.

And yet there is something about CTRL that doesn’t quite hit the sweet spot. The film merely scratches the surface, functioning more as a cautionary tale than a deep social commentary. That a happily-ever-after ending is not resorted to works in its favour. CTRL, however, could have been much more. But I guess that’s the way the ‘cookie’ crumbles.