Summary
Sector 36 has no idea what to do with heinous true-crime subject matter, and opts for an approach that is too inconsistent and over-the-top to be taken seriously.
Sector 36 is an odd film based on a heinous string of real crimes in Nithari, a residential enclave in New Delhi, in 2005-2006. “Odd” is a strange word for it, but it’s the best one I can think of; the Hindi-language Netflix movie is a surface-level portrait of a serial killer which oftentimes can’t seem to comprehend its grave subject matter or figure out how best to build a serious thriller around it.
And the killings were horrifying. Surinder Koli, the house help of a businessman named Maninder Pandher, confessed to sodomizing, killing, and dismembering nearly 20 children. Their body parts were discovered all over the place, buried on the grounds of Pandher’s compound, and bobbing up in drains.
Sector 36 is, without question, based on these killings, but it keeps the authentic details – particularly names – at arm’s length for the sake of creative license. A case that was defined by state negligence and a justice system unfit for purpose – both men were jailed and sentenced to death but eventually let off due to an apparent lack of evidence – becomes, in Aditya Nimbalkar’s film, a more fantastical tale of a cop who begins to take the matter seriously, and a serial killer with a made-for-TV rationale that softens the idea of pure, unbridled evil for its own sake.
Prem (Vikrant Massey), the renamed Koli, could have been more chilling than he ends up being. A smirking manservant with a wife and child (and another on the way), you’d never think he’s secretly chopping up kids with a meat cleaver, which is entirely the point. He’s slavishly devoted to entrepreneur Balbir Singh Bassi (Akash Khurana) but riled to the point of obsessive psychopathy by his poverty and a childhood of abuse and misfortune, particularly at the hands of a butcher uncle.
Inspector Ram Charan Pandey (Deepak Dobriyal), a cop who thrives by keeping his head down and doing the bare minimum his job requires, becomes steadily more invested in solving the case of disappearing children, helped along by Superintendent of Police Bhupen Saikia (Baharul Islam), but stymied at every turn by his boss DCP Jawahar Rastogi (Darshan Jariwala) and a system designed to be indifferent to the plight of migrants whose children are being kidnapped, raped, and killed by a serial murderer.
Pandey’s arc from general indifference to fully motivated lawman is oddly reminiscent of Officer Black Belt, a South Korean action-comedy that Netflix happened to release on the same day, and which was also about a man developing a profound sense of social and moral responsibility.
But Sector 36 is much darker and more serious than that, which is sometimes its problem. It would be very difficult to tell this story without unflinching seriousness, and the movie rarely manages to sustain that even during its most pivotal sequences. A long and explicit confessional is supposed to be a diabolical testimony, but the script by Bodhayan Roychaudhury renders it dangerously droll and too exaggerated to be taken especially seriously.
You can’t fault the actors, I don’t think. Massey is very good here, or at least he’s trying to be, but the affectations of his killer are another blow to the movie’s potential emotional power. What you’re left with is a strange effort to depict a terrible string of crimes deserving of much more seriousness and consideration than they’re afforded here.
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