“CTRL” is a slick and melodramatic Indian variation of the “runaway computer/evil AI” formula, a tale that begins jaunty and jokey and staggers into sinister in the most heavy-handed ways.

Ananya Panday stars as Nella, a pretty young woman who has made a good living and by making herself Internet famous via her coupling with doting, tech-savvy boyfriend Joe (Vihaan Samat).

They’ve made their name and their lifestyle brand NJoy, offering glimpses into their polished, upbeat-for-the-camera personal lives financed by a product-endorsing lifetstyle.

“Manifest your dream, girls, MANIFEST it!”

But living life online has its pitfalls, as Ms. Makeup, Style and Relationship advice shows up to “surprise” Joe at a restaurant business meeting on their fifth anniversary. She, her camera operator and their online audience see him cheating.

It all comes apart as it turns out our foul-mouthed Internet icon knows little about how to make the only “living” she knows. Her editor and effects guru and biz manager was Joe. While we can assume, from camera placement, that she’s been bringing a videographer along on their exploits, we’re apparently meant to believe she’s at least doing the filming for their live-streaming lives.

Enter CTRL, a new AI assistant you can customize to your liking, a gadget that can run your social media business, edit, add effects and music and produce your many videos and even field offers from brands that covet the newly-single, jilted Nella, who makes victimhood part of her new brand thanks to #CheaterJoe.

She selects the flirty, corny “Bro” version of the AI and names him “Allen” (voiced by Aparshakti Khurana in the Hindi version of the film, which is in Hindi — with subtitles, or dubbed).

“I have to say I’m jealous of your eyelids,” he smirks and winks, “because they get to spend the whole night with you.”

Allen can take on all the tasks of running her biz and her life. He can even “erase” Joe from every image and video from her vast online life, at her request. So he does, and we see Joe reduced to pixels and vanish from shot after shot.

But Joe’s trying to make contact, even if Nella won’t have it. And when he disappears, she will be the last to know who’s behind it. But we do. We’ve seen “2001,” “MEgan,” and every evil AI film in between.

The film’s early acts are bubbly as we follow Nella’s rise and quick fall and chuckle at her obvious/doofus AI “boyfriend” who sets out to tidy up her life.

But the second half is more convoluted and more obvious, with endless explanations of the sinister forces in play behind that AI, and Joe’s connection to them. Multiple characters give long online “explanations” of what’s going on.

They stop “CTRL” dead in its tracks.

The better approach is always to underexplain, make the mystery part of the suspense. The genre and the plot here pretty much ordains that there’s little of either in “CTRL.” An engaging lead performance loses its urgency and its agency as Nella is practically a bystander in her own (unemotional, underplayed) tragedy.

To say nothing of Joe’s, which his shallow, narcissistic lover barely notes.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, profanity

Cast: Ananya Panday, Vihaan Samat and Aparshakti Khurana

Credits: Directed by Vikramaditya Motwane, scripted by Vipin Agnihotri, Vikramaditya Motwane, Avinash Sampath and Sumukhi Suresh. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:39