Sector 36

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.

How do you approach a movie inspired by a series of gruesome killings that left a scar on the public but provided no closure? The police investigation into the 2006 Nithari serial murders—where a domestic help preyed on at least 19 minors, sexually assaulting them after their death, chopping their bodies into pieces and possibly indulging in cannibalism and organ harvesting, potentially with the tacit acknowledgement of his employer—was so badly botched that the case remains in the news in 2024, as the courts and agencies debate the sentencing. The two main accused were acquitted in 2023 over lack of sufficient evidence but India’s top crime body, CBI, has challenged it. With so many unknowable factors, this is rich territory for any filmmaker.