Vikrant Massey’s film is too damning to be a hard-hitting chronicle
New Delhi:
Portraits of psychopaths are never easy to take. Sector 362005-2006 Motivated by the Nithari murders, he tries to do the job without achieving much success. The film is never as boring or unsettling as one might expect. There are several reasons for this. Directed by Aditya Nimbalkar and written by Bodhayan Roychowdhury, the Netflix film cites Newton’s third law of motion – every action has an equal and opposite reaction – to explain why Prem (Vikrant Massey), a businessman’s employee who works as an unbridled butcher, He turned into that sort of devil.
As far as basic characterization goes, creating a context for unspeakable crimes, as a narrative conceit, is passable. But as a means of deep-dive exploration of an unspeakably gruesome series of murders that took place over months in a bungalow in a residential enclave in New Delhi, it lacks the necessary sting.
By justifying the love killings of underprivileged immigrant children living in a camp as opposed to an upmarket colony, the script softens the blow of a fictional retelling of a true crime and prevents the perpetrator from truly and memorably becoming a chilling movie character.
Love is a madman, a man completely consumed by violence. He uses a meat cleaver to cut up the bodies of the boys he sodomizes and kills. He didn’t stop there either. Cannibals come easily to him.
But if one meets him in the market, he can be mistaken for a friendly, ever-smiling guy who is unable to swat a fly. He has a wife and a daughter in the village. Another baby is on the way. But any child in a family without anything like love can be considered safe.
Because of the years of poverty and prosperity he sees around him, he is especially upset when contestants get a chance to win big prize money on a prime-time television quiz show that he watches without fail. He obsesses about one day getting into the hot seat and claims that if he does, he’ll come home with a hefty payday.
Prem lives in and looks after a bungalow owned by Karnal entrepreneur Balbir Singh Basi (Akash Khurrana), whose businesses are as versatile as they are shady. He serves his Lord with unwavering loyalty. He lures slum children into his dark den and sexually exploits them before killing them and cutting them into small pieces for easy disposal of the remains.
Sector 36, produced by Jio Studios and Maddox Films, provides a brief backstory about a butcher-uncle whose butcher Prem worked as an orphan boy two decades ago and suffered. In light of what happened there, the man believes that what he does to the world is a just response to what his uncle did to him.
The “equal and opposite reaction” theory is further worked out in the breach for inspector Ram Charan Pandey (Deepak Dobriyal), son of a deceased Banaras Hindu University professor of mathematics and Sanskrit. He tries not to react at all. This is his go-to defense mechanism.
Inspector Pandey leads a small police outpost with only two cops, plays Ravana in the local Ram Leela performance during Dussehra and speaks highly chaste Hindi to the consternation of his boss, DCP Jawahar Rastogi (Darshan Jariwala).
The inspector manages to deal with the strangulation of the ‘system’ by staying behind his superiors and doing enough policing to keep his job. He thrives on not rocking the boat.
But when the evil that Prem embodies hits home and his wife issues an ultimatum, Inspector Pandey decides he’s had enough. He sheds his indifference and cracks. He takes it upon himself to solve the mystery of the missing children. It’s easier said than done.
A reformed policeman’s quest to catch a cold-blooded serial killer should have been the stuff of an edge-of-the-seat thriller. Sector 36 is not. It does not cling and does not bite. What’s going on inside Prem’s bungalow – and his mind – is clear from the start.
The police’s initial outrage and eventual full-blown response to the despairing cries of helpless migrants whose children have disappeared without a trace – and at the call of duty – are key elements of the plot. Inspector Pandey faces resistance from his immediate superior, who replies that IPS stands for “In the Service of Politicians”, and looks for ways to break the shackles.
When a new officer – Superintendent of Police Bhupen Saikia (Baharul Islam) – is transferred from a small town to take charge of the Sector 36 police station, Pandey is given free rein. But that is not the end of the story.
In a lengthy confessional where the killer spells out his modus operandi in graphic detail, Vikrant Massey seizes the opportunity to go all out with a solo and hit the high point of his performance. Love brags and prances when he, among other horribly twisted things, smilingly presents a convenient excuse for murdering a teenage girl—his only victim who wasn’t a child.
Deepak Dobriyal, too, fills the screen with his shocked and bewildered expressions as Prem makes a clean breast of diabolical misdeeds. But none of what the two actors deliver during that extended key sequence delivers the desired punch in the gut.
The writing reduces the sequence to an encounter that borders on the droll and illuminates the heinous deeds of a despicable deviant. So the fault is clearly more with the script than the actors.
Macy’s interpretation of emotional love bridges the gap between the macabre and the joyful. A behavioral trait the character is given is an ugly cackle that he breaks out when he thinks he’s made a joke or stumbled upon something that amuses him.
The humor is a rather odd choice here, especially since it’s not dark enough. The character that Dobrial portrays gives the same loose, tongue-in-cheek ache. The situations Inspector Pandey finds himself in and the sarcasm he delivers often go hand in hand with the film’s serious content.
He’s by no means the only criminal in a film that’s supposed to be a hard-hitting chronicle of a crime that’s hard to wrap your head around.
