‘Sector 36’ Review: A Brilliantly Staged Rendition of the Nithari Killings

Director: Aditya Nimbalkar
Writer: Bodhayan Roychaudhary 
Cast: Vikrant Massey, Deepak Dobriyal, Akash Khurana, Darshan Jariwala
Streaming on: Netflix
Language: Hindi

Around 30 minutes into Sector 36, we see a corrupt sub-inspector indulging his little girl. He makes her giggle. His wife fondly watches on. It’s clear that he’s a good dad, even if he may not be a good man. In most movies, this would be just another sweet and harmless father-daughter moment. But here it’s an eerie scene, the kind where anything is possible. Because by now, the film has already featured the following: A rich 70-something paedophile with his granddaughter, a butcher molesting his teen nephew, a caretaker abducting and teasing a slumkid. We are conditioned to expect something sinister — and the film knows that. It’s why the scene opens like the others: with the face of a child. Nothing bad occurs this time, but the damage has been done. The trust is gone. The horror — of realising that all men are monsters until proven otherwise — is established.

If it isn’t apparent already, Aditya Nimbalkar’s Sector 36 is an unsparing thriller not-so-loosely based on the 2006 Noida serial murders (or the ‘Nithari killings’). The film-making has shades of Anurag Kashyap (think Ugly and Raman Raghav 2.0), Navdeep Singh’s NH10 (2015), Vishal Bhardwaj’s Haider (2014) and even Shanker Raman’s Gurgaon (2017). Yet, it also has a distinct authorial stamp. The NCR region has inspired a plethora of Netflix true-crime titles in recent years. But Sector 36 is easily the most compelling so far. It’s more in line with Talvar (2015), the dramatisation of the 2008 Noida double murder case co-written by Nimbalkar (with Bhardwaj). The story of a cannibalistic domestic helper and his employer is reimagined through the eyes of a transformed cop and his investigation. It stars Vikrant Massey and Deepak Dobriyal as the psychopath and policeman respectively, in what are two of the craftiest Hindi film performances of the year. But more on that later.

The thing about hard-to-stomach movies is that they tend to be exploitative. Most of them get carried away by the darkness; they enjoy toying with the viewer. Sector 36, too, has its fair share of provocations. It’s not just the blood and gore. Take the introduction of Prem Singh (Massey). Prem is living it up in the bungalow while his boss is away. He chats with his wife on the phone, finishes his meaty dinner, and then listens to a vintage song. The scene unfolds so casually that you just know it’s going to end with him hacking a corpse on the terrace. Those bones on his plate looked suspicious all along. The day-in-the-life-of-a-nutjob tone is an old gimmick. But Sector 36 doesn’t rest on its inherent disturbia. It knows how much to withhold, and resists the temptations of explicit imagery. Most of all, it chooses to chisel this story with the mallet of discrimination and class rage.

This approach unlocks the bigger picture. It offers a glimpse into an India where vanishing is seen as just another act of invisibilisation. The sewage of the bungalow flows into Rajiv Camp, an adjoining ghetto whose children Prem preys on. He knows that — as a community of minorities and migrants — their pleas fall on deaf (and bigoted) ears. The narrative details go a long way. For instance, Prem is obsessed with a Kaun Banega Crorepati-style game show. It reflects his shame of being poor and uneducated; it also reveals his desire to circumvent the system and be influential enough to not be held accountable for his sickness.

SI Ram Charan Pandey (Dobriyal) is a pious Hindu man whose complacence is shaped by prejudice. He swears by Newton’s third law of motion: “Every action has an equal and opposite reaction”. This law is precisely what drives their lives. Ram neglects the desperate parents in his jurisdiction because the system is built to neglect overworked law enforcement officers like him. Prem, too, pays his trauma forward; he was raped in his childhood by his uncle, so he reacts by doing the same to kids whom he claims to liberate from the working-class cycle of anonymity.

Some of the symbolism is familiar. Ram’s awakening happens because his own daughter is almost kidnapped from a Dussehra mela. He is playing Ravana on stage, but the image of him carrying his unconscious child appears against the background of a burning Ravana effigy. He loses his own ten-head mask in the process, as if to suggest that he has finally come to his senses; the demon in him is dead. He remembers his duty after this scene, but the film refuses to lionise him for merely doing his job. There’s a cockroach-and-shoe metaphor (“no matter how strong the cockroach becomes, the shoe always wins”) that implies that Ram remains culpable for letting so many marginalised people die under his watch. No matter how ‘heroic’ he becomes, he is an insect destined to be squashed by the very system he defies. This is evident from how the sub-plot of an upper-class abduction becomes national news. The film doesn’t overplay this part; it only exists so that Ram himself realises the disparity in basic rights.

I also like that Sector 36 reproduces the ambiguity of the real-life case; the role of the employer is never fully clear. The character here is smoothly played by veteran Akash Khurana, who does a Kulbhushan-Kharbanda-in-Mirzapur without the crutch of visual exposition. The film largely stays with Prem Singh, mirroring the police’s blind spots and the (mis)handling of the case. Prem’s confession unfolds as if it’s the climax, but it’s only the beginning of a third act in which his fate is reduced to that of a lowly driver in a hit-and-run case. You could argue that perhaps the filmmakers (and the streamer) are too cautious by not directly implicating the employer. That he is a paedophile who makes child pornography is the only thing that’s implied.

But look closer and, as in Talvar, the stance of the film emerges. A small detail — like the song (Mann Kyun Behka) Prem listens to in his opening scene — says a lot. The Laxmikant-Pyarelal classic is from Utsav, the 1984 film about a penniless Brahmin who is wrongly charged with the murder of the courtesan he loves; the powerful king is involved in the crime, but the young man takes the fall. This ties into Prem’s equation with the Bengali escort that his boss often summons. It’s this adult woman’s disappearance that, quite literally, unearths the skeletons in their closet. Maybe I’m reading too much into it, but this is a film absorbing enough to offer room for interpretation. It also makes you want to forgive the few chinks in its armour — like Prem’s icky childhood flashbacks and the gimmicky ending.

As strange as it sounds, the career trajectories of Deepak Dobriyal and Vikrant Massey supply their characters. They’re terrific Hindi film performers — unparalleled on their day — but somehow still fly under the mainstream radar despite years of accomplished work. “Underrated” is a mild term. Both Ram and Prem are more or less survivors of a system that only answers to power and influence. They are two sides of the same coin. This channelling is on full display during the long confession scene, a masterclass in acting and reacting.

A lesser artiste might have grandstanded the big psychopath moment and turned it into a showreel. But Massey nails the balance of showing and being. The little tics — constantly clearing his hairline; the leg-tapping and snorty laugh — never hijack his chillingly ordinary personality. There’s no Hannibal Lector or Joker here; it’s just a delusional North Indian monster masquerading as a man. Massey’s eyes are so empty at some points that it made me dread ever being in a closed space with him (something I had last written about Vijay Varma in Dahaad). I also don’t remember the last time I let out such an audible gulp while watching a scene.

Massey has all the words and gestures, but it’s a testament to Dobriyal’s talent that the sight of Ram listening — in incredulity, anger, resignation — is just as memorable. He does so much with so little. His facial muscles keep tightening, which is remarkable to see, because he uses a different version of the same deadpan expression when he’s taunting his subordinate. At times, this scene — where Prem’s confession cuts short Ram’s interrogation — is so effective that the rest of the film suffers by comparison. The third act nearly feels like a passing footnote. But perhaps that’s the point. Because once the truth subsides, it’s often the anticlimax of justice that remains. After all, most victims are buried — by birth, bureaucracy, country and means — the moment they’re born.