‘Sector 36’ review: Revisiting the house of horrors

Sector 36, based on the gruesome murders of Nithari village in Noida, which were uncovered in 2007, follows a serial killer who lives in plain sight. In Aditya Nimbalkar’s crime drama, Prem (Vikrant Massey) is the house-help of Balbir Bassi (Akash Khurana), an affluent businessman from Karnal. Bassi rarely visits his palatial bungalow in Delhi’s Sector 36, but when he does, his actions are also creepy. 

Prem, taking advantage of his unsupervised existence, far from his own family that lives in a village, abducts children from the neighbouring migrant settlement, mercilessly killing them to satisfy his deviant appetite.

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Sub-inspector Ram Charan Pandey (Deepak Dobriyal) is unmoved by distraught parents wishing to register FIRs about their missing children. The notice board at the local cop station is brimming with ‘missing’ posters. Cinematographer Saurabh Goswami’s camera pans over those images, lingering a moment as you absorb the trauma and distress of these families. In a film about multiple grisly deaths, with references to cannibalism, necrophilia and illegal organ trade, this is the most chilling moment. 

A bad judgement call by Prem puts him on a collision course with Pandey, who, after finally having a change of heart, works tirelessly to bring the criminal to book. Along the way, he benignly submits to harassment from his superior officer Rastogi (Darshan Jariwala), who happens to be Bassi’s buddy.

Through one flashback scene from 1983, Nimbalkar quickly shows what made the boy Prem into an insatiable serial killer. Prem is fascinated with a TV quiz show called ‘Sab Banenge Crorepati’, a tool that is used during his in-camera interrogation when Prem performs for the camera. Massey finally gets to break out of the confines of limited performance space to hold the audience’s attention as he unashamedly takes you into his character’s messed-up mind. It’s a remarkable scene which is underlined by Prem’s arrogant belief that his powerful master will protect him.

Khurana is all kinds of icky and Dobriyal does well to convey an educated man who knows he cannot beat the system, yet cannot ignore his conscience either. Editor Sreekar Prasad keeps the 123-minute drama moving along, even though the crimes are visually tepid and the recreations are slightly scrubbed of horror.

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In an effort to balance its cops-versus-criminals story, the film suggest cover-ups and classism on the part of the police, but does not delve into the psyche of either. The police work is scanty, the punishments are fleetingly mentioned, yet the makers suggest that this is indeed how the Nithari murders and investigation panned out. 

In the later parts of the film, writer Bodhayan Roychaudhury shifts away from the mind of the murderer to Pandey’s determination to prove that Bassi was complicit in the crimes. The sidelining of the criminals and their court cases feels like a move calculated to sidestep potential legalities associated with the real-life characters who occupied and buried secrets in the “house of horrors”. 

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