Sector 36
Crime Thriller Drama Hindi
When several children disappear at the hands of a serial killer in Sector 36, a corrupt cop is forced to pursue the chilling case at all costs.
| Cast: | Vikrant Massey, Deepak Dobriyal, Akash Khurana, Darshan Jariwala, Baharul Islam, Ivana Kaur, Mahadev Singh Lakhawat, Ajeet Singh Palawat, Kacho Ahmad, Fareed Ahmad, Subir Bisawas |
|---|---|
| Director: | Aditya Nimbalkar |
| Writer: | Bodhayan Roychaudhury |
| Editor: | Sreekar Prasad |
| Camera: | Saurabh Goswami |
All Guild Reviews of Sector 36
Revisiting the house of horrors
Vikrant Massey goes dark in this crime thriller based on the Nithari murders
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.
A Spotify Review
Sector 36 is a gratuitously grisly dramatisation of the gruesome Nithari serial murders from around two decades ago. But because it unfolds with zero nuance, the movie mines cheap thrills out of a real-life horror story. We talk about the strange arcs that Vikrant Massey and Deepak Dobriyal’s characters have been given, the haphazard narrative structure, and seemingly missing sequences that could’ve helped make the story smoother. We also talk about Massey’s performance in the interrogation scene and the filmmakers’ odd decision to set the movie in Delhi and not Noida, where the actual crimes took place.
Botched just like the real-life investigation
The Netflix movie is as poorly handled as the police’s work on the 2006 Nithari serial murders that it’s based on.
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.
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