Building Survival, One Broken Appliance at a Time — Trapped

In 2015, I was supposed to be in Germany on an exchange programme, studying automobile engineering. Instead, I was on the 30th floor of a vacant Mumbai high-rise, taking apart a television with my bare hands.

The film was Trapped — Vikramaditya Motwane's survival thriller about a man sealed inside a locked apartment with no food, no water, and no way out. Rajkumaar Rao played the lead entirely alone for most of the film's runtime, and every object he improvised to stay alive had to exist as a real, working prop. My job was to make his survival believable, one reverse-engineered device at a time.

I was 22, freshly graduated as a Mechanical Engineer. My job title was Jr. Associate Art Director. I barely understood what that meant at the time — but I understood machines, materials, and how things come apart.

Over the course of a month, I designed and fabricated 17 DIY survival devices: a rainwater collector rigged on a high-rise balcony, a catapult, a firestarter fashioned from steel wool and a dead battery, a rat trap, a urine-powered battery, and a guitar made from wooden sticks and a paint can with rope for strings. Four of the seventeen made the final cut of the film.

The Film and the People Behind It

Vikramaditya Motwane is one of Hindi cinema's most precise directors — the mind behind Udaan, Lootera, and AK vs AK. Trapped was his most stripped-down work: a near-dialogue-free survival film set almost entirely in one locked apartment.

Rajkumaar Rao had already won a National Award for Shahid before Trapped. Here he lost significant weight for the role and carried almost every frame alone — his performance and the props around him were the entire movie.

How the Film Was Received

Trapped released in 2017 to widespread critical acclaim. Critics called it a masterclass in minimalist filmmaking — a survival thriller that worked not through spectacle but through the slow, grinding logic of a man forced to improvise his way back to life. Rao's performance was recognised at multiple award ceremonies, and the film has since been cited as one of the more formally ambitious Indian films of that decade.

None of it worked without the props being real. You cannot fake a firestarter in close-up. The rainwater collector had to actually collect water. The guitar had to have strings that vibrated. That is what the month on the 30th floor was for.