Sector 36 is not an easy watch. It is not meant to be. It is a film that pulls no punches and makes no bones about it. A lot of what it shows is meant to make the viewer uncomfortable, which it does (pun intended) quite comfortably. A lot of it is also meant to be a call to our collective consciousness, and it doesn’t do that in a subtle manner. That is why Sector 36 — no matter how difficult a watch it is — needs to be on your watchlist this weekend.
I watched Sector 36, now streaming on Netflix, about three weeks before its release. Given what had happened at RG Kar Hospital just a few days prior, the film hit home even more, prompting me to pause quite often, pull myself together and then go back to it. Going back to it was necessary — not only because this review had to be written, but because the film mirrors so much of the reality we live in.
Abuse, paedophilia, rape, murder, necrophilia, cannibalism... director Aditya Nimbalkar puts together a film which may seem fictional but is “inspired by real events”. Less than 10 minutes into the film, we know that it is a dramatised version of the Nithari killings that rocked the nation about two decades ago. But dig deeper and Sector 36 — through its scathing examination of class divide, childhood abuse and the plight of millions in India who live unseen and die unknown — is a sum total of the newspaper headlines that leap out at us every morning.
At the centre of it are two men, the lines between whom blur quite often. When we first meet Prem Singh — played by Vikrant Massey, who throws in a curveball in a role so dark that it hardly has any redeeming features — he is clad in a dressing gown, two sizes too big for his scrawny frame. Sprawled on a sofa in an expensive-looking home, he is watching Kaun Banega Crorepati with the kind of passion that makes you think he is the one on the hotseat. Prem goes to the kitchen, rinses his dinner plate off bones that seem too large to be that of any animal, proceeds to lovingly call his wife in the ‘gaon’ and then picks up a sinister-looking knife. He switches on the light of the bathroom and we see a young girl there, ‘sitting’ lifeless. With cold-blooded precision, Prem proceeds to chop the girl into pieces.
The scene is a masterclass in storytelling, starting off innocuously and ending in an unimaginably grisly manner. Prem, the caretaker of a bungalow in Sector 36, is a habitual predator, luring young boys and girls from the nearby camp of immigrants. They all end up dead after suffering abuse. Vikrant, that dreamy, ambitious, sweet Manoj Kumar Sharma of 12th Fail, slips into Prem like second skin, once again illustrating the versatility of his craft.
The other major player in this story is cop Ram Charan Pandey (Deepak Dobriyal excels). Assigned to Rajeev Camp, the immigrant tenement from which kids mysteriously disappear, courtesy Prem, Pandey lets these missing children remain a picture on the board of the police station, scarcely lifting a finger to probe even one case. Reason? Immigrants are the faceless section of our society. No one cares about them, either dead or alive. It is only when Pandey experiences something similar that hits close to home does his conscience jolt awake. What he uncovers after that — encumbered by a system that only serves the rich and well-connected — is a can of worms. And many, many body parts.
Aided by superlative acts from his two leads, Nimbalkar mounts his film in such a way that almost every scene feels like a whiplash. The one that must be mentioned is the interrogation scene in the police station with a smiling Prem — with immense pride — talking about his heinous crimes. He wants to get it over and done with considering that the latest episode of KBC is scheduled to start anytime soon and it would be sacrilegious for him to miss it. Prem’s nonchalance as he reveals his body count is juxtaposed with Pandey’s pent-up feelings of anger, disbelief and frustration as he hears him out. It is the kind of scene that should be made compulsory viewing in acting schools.
Sector 36 ends with one man as scapegoat and the other a victim of the system he sought to clean up. Nothing changes, it says, unfortunately, in the face of power, prestige and paisa. That is why this film is recommended viewing. More importantly, that is why this film is necessary viewing.
