5 Stories Plotted Over the Fear of COVID – 19: Unpaused
Amazon Prime, as we all know has been that OTT platform that has been providing space to the different, exciting, and experimental content. The recent release of Prime, ‘Unpaused’ is absolutely a fresh and part-real anthology of 5 stories, plotted over the condition of a situation like a Pandemic. More than the development of a pandemic situation, the stories are a narrative about human fears and how a situation like the COVID pandemic strengthens the other fears including the fear of being touched.
The five stories of namely, Glitch, The Apartment, RAT-A-TAT, Vishaanu, and Chand Mubarak, all are enfolded around reality and uncertainty of the moments, probably each one of us must have witnessed in our initial day with the COVID pandemic. And the five of them show the duality of a situation like a pandemic, where fear is precisely in battle with their human emotions, and the irony of the times is such that all of it is blissfully grey. Do you remember your initial pandemic days? The developing fear and paranoia, layering anxieties, with you, getting back to cherishing some of the most trivial moments with your family, to seeing news every day and knowing the plight of people and the moments of choosing humanity over fear. Unpaused is all about those stories.
The first story, The Glitch is Dystopian, where COVID 30 has hit the world, and due to a glitch in the dating app system, two strangers, of which one is paranoid and the other is a warrior happen to accidentally meet. While both of them are absolutely opposite to each other, yet they eventually fall in love over the digital screens as obviously, why will a hypo meet a warrior. But as we mentioned, it is blissfully grey, the hypo’s love made him get over his fear and they eventually met.
The Apartment, which is the second fragment of the anthology is a bit different from that of others and comments on mental health, precisely not just in times of the pandemic but in general. The protagonists, Richa Chaddha and Sumit Vyas are a couple running a news magazine, and because of their husband being accused of being a sexual predator while the news of the Pandemic has just broken. Richa (Devika), in anxiety and helplessness, tries to kill herself, and every time she tries, the neighbour comes to stop her indirectly and gives her a subtle message of life and hope.
The third part, RAT-A-TAT is about a woman who is in her early old age and is really a woman who doesn’t like a lot of social interaction. A young girl who works as a production designer happens to live in her neighbourhood, and here, we see the greyness of the characters. The woman who isn’t used to social interaction, and with developed fear of the pandemic, allowed the girl in neighbour to stay with her. And, eventually, both the woman happened to share a strong bond. The young girl made the old lady rewind her love for singing.
The fourth story, ‘Vishaanu’ opens with a small family of migrant workers living in a lavish flat in which they are living illegally as they are homeless. The only fear that they have had was that they didn’t want to be caught. The pandemic was not their fear yet the story narrates a tale of the plight of the migrant workers.
The last and precisely the most impactful one is of an old woman, who has been so independent that even in times of COVID, she has to bring her medicines on her own, even in the pandemic. She is extremely fearful of COVID, and for her, her health does not allow her to sit in a Rikshaw but she eventually had to sit. The rickshaw wala and the old women eventually happened to develop a bond of care lined over fears of the pandemic.
Well, the anthology has those small moments which will take us back to a sense of relativity. In every moment, there is some likeness with our fears with the Coronavirus and representation of moments where we choose to prioritize the emotions over the fears.
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