Early on in Harshad Nalawade’s Follower, we see its central character, Raghvendra “Raghu” Pawar (Raghu Prakash), commuting to work one morning. It’s an innocuous little routine—a man rides through town on his motorbike. The passing scenery is reminiscent of any tier-2 Indian city: dusty cricket grounds, petrol pumps, bus stops, a giant clock, a flyover under construction, a bridge. 

A closer look, however, reveals that the streets simmer with unresolved frictions and resolute fictions. Garlanded statues of fabled kings compete for attention with garlanded statues of fabled queens. Flags of clashing political parties and communities dot the statues and bus stops. A lone church shies away in the background. Raghu has the stoic manner of a combatant weaving through the debris of a decades-long dispute. 

We soon learn that this town, Belgaum, is a war zone of identity. Situated along the Maharashtra-Karnataka border, it’s the ground zero of conflict between the two states. But the fissures are more cultural than ideological—language, not faith, is the primary divider. Dominated by a Marathi-speaking population, the region is geographically owned and governed by Karnataka. The result is a land torn between Kannada and Marathi outfits, each determined to reclaim their territorial and linguistic supremacy. 

Raghu’s Maharashtrian heritage propels him to the front lines. The ‘office’ he’s going to is a hate factory parading as an online publication called Samyukta Vaani; his work is to amplify and exaggerate news, tweets, and videos dedicated to the Marathi cause. His bike dons a picture of the propaganda-spewing leader (Atul Deshmukh) they worship. 

On his way to work every morning, the stakes in his head feel heightened: the Belgaum he rides through is, in the leader’s own words, their “Gaza and Kashmir”. Except nobody can hear the missiles. The flyover under construction looks like a flyover under destruction. The grounds resemble battlefields on the brink. The traffic circles branch into loyalties, not directions. He’s a keyboard warrior, but he’s still a warrior. 

The Hollowness of Modern-Day “Following”

The first half of the 100-minute-long Follower explores the hollowness of modern-day “following”. Raghu is a radicalized youngster, but everything about him points to a makeshift personality. He spends his days writing inflammatory posts on the computer, paying no heed to the lewd banter of his colleagues. Raghu is so committed that he sees himself as an unpaid activist—his salary lies untouched in his desk drawer. 

His rebellion feels like a performance designed to preserve his illusion of purpose. He proposes marriage to a woman he likes by flaunting the vanity of his job as a journalist. His display picture is draped in the saffron shades of fascism. He is seldom affected by the irony of being a Hindu man fighting for prominence with other Hindus in a Hindu-majority nation. 

Every now and then, though, Raghu’s performance cracks under the burden of common sense. At one point in Follower, he watches the video of a Kannadiga YouTuber— a former friend named Sachin (played by the director himself)—and gets emotional. Sachin is an opponent of sorts; he makes content that exposes the Marathi commander’s efforts to politicise the fault-lines of a fractured city. The video punctures Raghu’s apathy; he tears his supreme leader’s poster off his vehicle and drives to Sachin’s house to rekindle their friendship. 

Raghu’s actions here are driven partly by nostalgia and partly by the fact that his radicalization is an empty front for an aimless life. He knows, deep inside, that he doesn’t believe in the poison he’s spreading. He rings Sachin’s doorbell, but nobody’s at home—that’s where his moment of ‘weakness’ ends. The spell only momentarily breaks, and Raghu’s rage returns.

At another point in Follower, a matrimonial meeting ends with the seemingly subservient girl—who’s just spent a few minutes being treated as an object on sale by both families—questioning Raghu’s ideals. He is taken aback when she asks if being in the majority gives him the right to claim power. He’s plagued with self-doubt when she argues that, technically, every one of them is a migrant. 

Even in the scene where he ignores his colleagues, Raghu is put off when they lust after the “fair skin tones of Muslim women” while referring to the Pakistani heroine (Mahira Khan) of the 2017 Shah Rukh Khan-starring gangster drama, Raees. Raghu’s bigotry is conveniently limited to language—not gender, caste, or religion—because the subject of his desire, Parveen (Donna Munshi), is a single Muslim mother. His fondness for Parveen also stems from a shared history: she is the stabilizer between volatile Raghu and self-righteous Sachin in this former childhood trifecta.

He only resorts to incel-coded abuse once she turns him down. Maybe there’s a deleted scene of him watching Sandeep Reddy Vanga movies and Andrew Tate videos to build up some steam. Unlike the radicalization in the hit Netflix miniseries Adolescence, the protagonist’s arc here is tangible because he’s striving to be seen by a society that treats him as a label. He still sees himself as an antidote to Sachin, whom the film stages as the prototype of predatory privilege. One can almost hear Raghu thinking: “At least I don’t pretend to be progressive”.

In other words, the first half of Follower democratizes the nature of a troll. Raghu thinks he’s a specific kind of foot soldier, but it’s hard to tell the violence of one army from the bloodshed of another. It doesn’t matter whether he’s right-wing or left-wing, pro-establishment or anti-establishment; extremism is often a tool to wrest control of wandering stories.

This is evident in how the same actors play Raghu’s Marathi colleagues and the Kannadiga goons who barge into his shop. Their allegiance looks no different from that of any disillusioned Indian mobilized by manufactured narratives of hate and bigotry. 

A Nobody Who Could Be Anybody

In a country where positions of power are notoriously divorced from a sense of humor—whether it’s the salty Deputy Chief Minister of Maharashtra punching down on an outspoken stand-up comic, or a salty Bollywood producer misquoting a film critic to gain online traction—it’s puppets like Raghu that become a punchline in search of the joke. He is a nobody who could be anybody. 

Raghu could be one of the bitter Hindu moviegoers tearing up cinema screens when Aurangzeb, the ‘evil’ Muslim emperor, appears in Chhaava, the noxious Hindi historical drama tailored to fan the flames of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s identity politics. He could be one of the right-wing rioters standing beside the burning effigies of Aurangzeb’s tomb during communal violence in Nagpur. 

He could be one of the countless social media handles behind the #JusticeForSSR movement—a toxic online campaign hijacked by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) IT cell to weaponize the grief surrounding a popular actor’s suicide, target his ex-girlfriend, and distract from a crippled economy. He could be one of the clueless Shiv Sena goons vandalizing the studio that hosted comedian Kunal Kamra’s latest gig. 

He could also be one of the many Kannada activists who halted the Belagavi screening of Follower, a Marathi-Kannada cautionary tale about the perils of guileless activism. He could also be the person employed by the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) to sift through the film’s theatrical print and censor identifiers like “Muslim” and “Karnataka,” unironically feeding its core theme.

A Coming-Of-Age Tragedy

But it’s the second half of Follower that unveils the anatomy of a troll. It traces the faces of those often reduced to faceless mobs in the blood-inked margins of history. We see the year leading up to his change of career, back when Raghu was more of a singular entity than a plural idea. We see the slow but sure zombification of a boy next door. The film quietly locates the cumulative shapelessness of the source of his extremist views. 

Some of the factors are personal. Raghu’s father dies in an accident, forcing him to quit his teaching job and reluctantly run the family gift shop. An engineer by education, he struggles to process this twist of fate. His friendship with Sachin and Parveen enters love-triangle territory—and sours—as a consequence.

The story of ‘New India’ is rooted in their crumbling bond: the middle-class Hindu striver reacts to the smugness of the upper-class liberal, and a strong-minded Muslim woman becomes the catalyst of a fallout. It emerges that Raghu’s choices stem from spite rather than authenticity; he takes up a cause that’s the polar opposite of Sachin’s. 

Some of the factors are societal. The dismantling of Raghu’s private life pushes him to notice the crevices it once sheltered him from. His anxiety is fuelled by a Kannadiga landlord threatening to raise the rent of his store. A detail that previously didn’t irk him—a law requiring every shop name to be displayed in three languages—expands his narrative of othering and victimhood. 

He is multilingual but begins to register his own transitions between Belagavi Hindi, Kannada, and Marathi. His compliance as an apolitical citizen leading a safe life mutates into a broader indignation towards a place that keeps reminding him of his ‘place’. He lashes out at protestors who try to intimidate him, and loses his patience with local vendors. It’s almost as if Raghu then searches for echo chambers to hear himself better. 

The most perceptive thing about Follower is that it diversifies the complicity of everyday living in the breeding of a troll. It’s not as simple as showing Raghu as a symptom of systemic rot. His circumstances are hardly extraordinary: a parent’s death, a shaky business, a black-sheep syndrome. 

His isolation is more insidious—and seamless. The algorithm is designed to prey on the act of mere existence. He spends his free time mindlessly scrolling through reels of news clips and lynchings. Video calls with his sanctimonious US-based brother make way for solitary meals, with only his cell phone or television set—flashing videos of a rage-baiting politico—for company. Arguments with his mother spiral into questions about his duty as the ‘man of the house’. Political hoardings remain just outside his line of vision during dull days at the shop. 

He catches the strays of Sachin’s spat with a restaurant waiter who refuses to serve chicken on a festival day. He dances and drinks away his sorrows, not at a club, but at the most readily available event: a Ganesh Chaturthi procession.

Raghu’s brainwashing is so natural that it almost feels like a coming-of-age story. If he were the hero of one of the many Bollywood revisionist period biopics that summon the mechanized fanaticism of minions like him, he’d be a martyr who breaks free from ‘oppression’ and finds his calling. Watching him in the second half is like watching a vigilante flattening the moral questions of a survival thriller. 

Follower ends where the film begins—newly recruited as a “journalist”, hopeful, but also vaguely aware that he might in fact be a coming-of-age tragedy. 

The circularity suggests that we live in an age where communal tension is often derived from reversing tenses: fabled kings and queens from the past are garlanded and killed for, but regular people today are consigned to the lifelessness of concrete statues.

Once the credits roll, as a viewer, it’s tempting to revisit the first half immediately, armed with context. This narrative structure defines the cyclical essence of following: Raghvendra Pawar is a cog in the wheel of an endless loop. All the exits are blocked.