Vikrant Massey

Sector 36: A Slick Thriller That Prioritises Luridness Over Economy or Empathy

Based on the ghastly case of children’s bodies being found in a bungalow, Aditya Nimbalkar’s film is missing the human factor.

Watching Aditya Nimbalkar’s Sector 36, if one is reminded of Talvar (2015), there might be a good reason for it.

Nimbalkar, along with Vishal Bhardwaj, wrote Meghna Gulzar’s film based on the 2008 Noida double murder case. Another common strand between the two films involves a slippery subordinate. Sohum Shah, playing Irrfan’s dutiful junior in Gulzar’s film, is shown to be a Judas. What really works in that one, is how the audience is blindsided, like Irrfan’s character. Without delving into spoiler territory, something similar happens in Nimbalkar’s directorial debut as well. What remains impressive here, is the economy with which the ‘twist’ is delivered.

From one high-profile case in Noida to another, Sector 36 is based on the similarly gruesome 2006 case that took place only a kilometre away from the Talwars’ residence, where the remains of more than a dozen dead people (most of them children) were discovered in a home inhabited by a well-connected, upper-class businessman and his man Friday.

‘Inspired’ by that case, Nimbalkar’s film investigates the institutional apathy and the moral rot in our society that allowed it to go on for so long. But, where a case could be made for Gulzar’s film being the best procedural in Hindi cinema – thorough, graceful and subtle —Nimbalkar’s film, despite being evocatively shot (by Saurabh Goswami), doesn’t carry the heft of its counterpart. Sector 36 seems so fixated on the grisliness of the crime, it doesn’t delve deeper into its people.

The film opens with a sensational point-of-view shot-a reality-show (like Kaun Banega Crorepati) is playing upside down. We see Prem (Vikrant Massey) lying upside down, with a glass of whiskey in hand, trash-talking the participants in the reality show. The film is set in the mid-2000s, when the bug of reality show fame is arguably at its peak. Most people genuinely believe that a reality show is all that stands between them and wealth that could solve all their problems. Similarly, Prem – who works as a full-time caretaker in a palatial bungalow in Shahdara (East Delhi) – thinks he’s meant for better things. He cooks, cleans, loiters around the bungalow. He also abducts, kills and butchers the body of his captives.

A still from ‘Sector 36’.

Deepak Dobriyal plays sub-inspector Pandey, a mid-career cop who has come to terms with his own uselessness. Pandey stopped pretending to be the upright cop a while ago, but that doesn’t make him immune to the plight of the parents reporting their missing children. He’s loose, morally flexible, but he’s also still listening to them. He’s not completely cut off from humanity yet. It is visible most during a Dusshera performance, where Pandey, playing Raavan, smirks and laughs through his lines. When a parent confronts him backstage, Pandey gives it back to him. “We’re only three officials for a population of 150,000 people! Don’t we deserve time off?,” he barks. However, a scare only a few moments later when he prevents his own daughter from getting kidnapped, turns him around. He is now personally invested in the case.

As Pandey tries to investigate the case, he finds links of the crime to the bungalow of Mr Bassi (Akash Khurrana). It’s the same bungalow where Prem works as a caretaker, and even though it’s first suggested that he does these things without the knowledge of his employer, later scenes reveal otherwise. Bassi is introduced in a creepy scene, around his granddaughter. Turns out, Bassi knows about Prem’s serial killer side, and makes good use of it. Pandey’s attempts to investigate it are shut down by his superiors, after Bassi makes a phone call to them.

A still from ‘Sector 36’.

To showcase the stark contrast, Nimbalkar’s film also stages an abduction of a rich school boy, as Pandey runs around haplessly for answers. The rich boy is predictably found within two days, after the media and the law enforcement run amok with the story. It’s a very on-the-nose parallel to showcase the system’s callous apathy for missing children from the shanties who disappear, and everyone forgets they even existed in the first place. It’s that widespread, and that common.

A brilliant film about a child disappearing is Richie Mehta’s Siddharth (2016) – where a father (Rajesh Tailang) searches for his missing son over several years. Even the most hardened souls feel charitable towards him, but all paths lead to a dead-end. A person ceases to exist one day, like he never existed.

A still from ‘Sector 36’.

Nimbalkar’s film on the other hand is too content with depicting the luridness of the serial killings to fully grasp its significance. Sector 36 has the shock value of a true-crime documentary (I’m not surprised that it found a home at Netflix), minus the socio-political curiosity. It does make some noise about its social consciousness, but it’s not enough.

Police procedurals grappling with the moral rot in a society, are an intriguing genre of cinema with established titans ranging from Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974) – which was ably adapted by Navdeep Singh into Manorama Six Feet Under (2007) to Sudip Sharma’s Kohhra (2023) more recently. Massey and Dobriyal are good for their parts, but something is amiss. I couldn’t help but feel like Sector 36 seemed like the first draft of a Navdeep Singh/Sudip Sharma film.

Vidhu Vinod Chopra’s ’12th Fail’ Floors You with its Kindness and Sincerity

It could have been another humdrum film about the underdog, but the director avoids cheap and easy traps.

I’ll admit I kept my distance from Vidhu Vinod Chopra’s 12th Fail for a long time, thinking it would eventually deliver the same old spiel about India’s rat race, something we’ve been assaulted with in Chopra’s 2008 production 3 Idiots, and umpteen TVF shows on India’s many competitive entrance exams. Chopra’s middling work as a director in the last two decades post-Parinda also probably had something to do with it, ensuring my cynicism remained despite a promising start. I was almost confident that it was only a matter of time before the film’s graph would plummet. Hence, I was surprised to find myself holding my breath during the final stretch. It was around then that I realised that the film had me in its palm, and I was desperately rooting for the protagonist – Manoj Kumar Sharma (Vikrant Massey) – a boy out of a village in Chambal (Madhya Pradesh), preparing for his UPSC exams in Delhi. It was also during this very scene when I realised Chopra’s film had floored me.

12th Fail is a painfully old story of an underdog, built around India’s unforgiving and unequal education system. A boy living in a faraway village, sees an impossible dream. The first time we see him, he’s furiously making notes. A voiceover clarifies – he’s making chits on the day before his 12th board exams. We see a municipal school and callous teachers – the kind who write “borad exams” on the blackboard without a second thought. Manoj’s goal is to pass his boards so he can take up the job of an office peon. All he has to do is, replicate the answers from his chits into the answer sheet.

Unfortunately for Manoj and other students, an honest cop (Priyanshu Chatterjee) enters the picture. He won’t allow any cheating during boards, and as a result, the entire batch fails. It’s a wake-up call for the likes of Manoj, who haven’t had a role model in their lives until then. Almost starstruck by the cop and his aura, he makes up his mind – he will become a police officer, just like the DSP in his village.

Using the last savings of his grandmother (thanks to her monthly armed forces pension), Manoj makes his way to Gwalior first, and then eventually to Delhi. Training his eyes on the UPSC – arguably the toughest exam to crack in the world – Manoj’s life becomes a rollercoaster over the next 7-8 years, and we become a part of it.

There’s barely anything in 12th Fail that we haven’t seen before. A new boy in a strange city, having all his belongings stolen on the very first day – it used to be a staple scene in most Hindi films, especially when it involved the characters making their way to Bombay. And yet, it doesn’t feel repetitive in Chopra’s film, because we’re personally invested in Manoj’s journey. We’re in his shoes, as he makes the decision to not go back home until he’s made something of his life.

On paper, 12th Fail shouldn’t work like it does. It’s not the most novel story, and the obstacles are something we’re all acutely aware of, even possibly desensitised to. A boy from hinterland India, barely scraping through his 12th boards, living in a big city, someone who misreads ‘tourism in India’ as ‘terrorism in India’, someone who has to work 12-15 hours a day so he can study for six hours and then survive on three hours of sleep. The odds are so comprehensively stacked against him, no one would blame him for failing, or giving up. But he doesn’t – and that’s what becomes “inspirational” about this story.

It’s a journey we’ve been on in earlier films, but 12th Fail has a stellar ‘feel’ for authenticity. It makes a few surprising choices – Manoj’s lack of proficiency in English is never mocked, it’s a source for tragedy. The teacher at the coaching centre could’ve been someone with tics, which could be mined for humour. Instead, Chopra casts Vikas Divyakirti, who runs a coaching centre for UPSC exams in real life. Unlike the eccentric teachers we’ve seen in films, Divyakirti uses his tranquil voice to bring a thousand racing minds [in his class] to a pause. It’s only a small part of the world of 12th Fail, but it helps the audience fully immerse itself in Manoj’s journey.

He also surrounds his protagonist with a lovely bunch of actors – Anshuman Pushkar (who broke out in the Netflix show Jamtara) plays the ‘veteran’ in the Mukherjee Nagar area, who didn’t make it. So, he makes it his life’s mission to coach the next generation of hopefuls, especially those with limited means like Manoj. There’s Anantvijay Joshi as Pandey – the narrator of the film – who studies alongside Manoj, but is significantly more ‘well-settled’. Harish Khanna, playing Manoj’s father, undertakes his own journey of fighting a lengthy legal battle against his superiors in a government office and is handed the film’s finest scene, where he tells his son the uselessness of upright honesty in the world. It’s the voice of a man with a bitter awakening too late in his life – only to be reminded, by his own son, of the values he passed on to his son.

Above all, 12th Fail is a paean to Vikrant Massey’s astronomical amounts of sincerity. Manoj’s journey through all the obstacles could also serve as a parallel for Massey – a gifted young actor – charting his way through the jungle of a Bollywood career. Just like any other walk of life, the system benefits a certain kind of prospect, and rarely reciprocates hard work. He’s never been terrible even in the most questionable films of his career, and therefore, it feels like a personal victory to see a film doing justice to Massey’s dedication to throwing himself into a part. Seeing Manoj emerge from the darkest holes and greet people with a wide smile, despite going through the most trying phases, is an image from the film that I’ll carry with me for a long time.

Vidhu Vinod Chopra’s 12th Fail almost feels like an early Rajkumar Hirani film – when simplicity of thought didn’t necessarily culminate into contrived screenwriting. And where the story always knew how to play a delicate dance of good intentions and entertainment. Unlike most underdog films in mainstream Hindi cinema, where one eye is on the box office, the tears and catharsis in 12th Fail always feel earned. This could’ve very easily been a sappy, sentimental film – but Chopra never compromises the idealism in his story for an easier, cheaper way. 12th Fail is proof that crowd-pleasing films can find a way to be so, without losing sight of their integrity.

Review: Haseen Dilruba is a Collection of Obvious Tropes and Recycled Characters

The film wants to reach a certain point, but its journey is devoid of convincing reasons or considered nuance.

A young woman moves from a big city to a small town, finds her new life suffocating, and hatches a plan to escape. This logline describes both Gone Girl and the latest Netflix release, Haseen Dillruba. But unlike the David Fincher directorial, which was based on a bestselling novel, Vinil Mathew’s film takes inspiration from a fictional pulp thriller, Kasauli Ka Kahar.

The movie opens with Rani (Taapsee Pannu), a young homemaker in a small north Indian town, Jwalapur, feeding pieces of raw mutton to street dogs. Moments later, a huge explosion rips her house, killing her husband, Rishu (Vikrant Massey). A dead husband, a young wife, a seasoned cop (Aditya Srivastava) – and an expected suspect, Rani. The thriller opens on a note of intrigue – we don’t know anything about the people, place, or crime – and then cuts to six months earlier showing how Rishu and Rani got married.

An engineer in Jwalapur Electricity Board, Rishu is a generic simpleton: shy, introverted, awkward. He travels to Delhi with his parents to meet Rani. She is everything Rishu is not: confident, funny, sassy. This segment of the film, the cue-ridden background score reminds us again and again and again, is a ‘comedy’. Rishu’s mother says they’re looking for a “sundar” and “susheel” bride. Rani’s mother serves them snacks, saying her daughter has cooked them (even the customary phrase used in these settings remains unchanged: “yeh sab usne apne haathon se banaya hai”). It’s quite formulaic, but maybe, you wonder, it’s a dig on the overused Bollywood depictions. Rishu and Rani, despite their many differences, get married and move to Jwalapur.

It’s then that the film embraces mediocrity – and never stops. Screenwriter Kanika Dhillon throws a bucketful of clichés at the wall – a whole lot of them stick, and she collects the ones that don’t to be reused later. Even the characters and situations are recycled types that don’t challenge our expectations: a contrasting pair, a nosy mother-in-law, a dead marriage.

Afflicted by familiar flaws

Haseen Dillruba is afflicted by familiar flaws tainting mainstream Bollywood. The film wants to reach a certain point, but its journey is devoid of convincing reasons or considered nuance. Rani gets married to Rishu, even though she hasn’t gotten over her ex and knows that this guy is not her type. Why get married then, why not wait for someone more suitable? Unlike Rishu, she puts in no effort to make the marriage work (well, why get married then?). She still complains to her mother and aunt about the lack of spark in her relationship. They advise her to be a seductress; she does, and the film devolves into a farcical segment that neither elevates intrigue nor induces humour. She complains to her mother about Rishu’s premature ejaculation, when he is literally a few feet away from her in the bathroom. (Again, beats all common sense.) These are not complex characters but tired tropes obeying a screenplay’s diktats.

The film continues to operate in this mode, with the confidence of an engineering dudebro at a party who thinks he has the best jokes and a charming presence. (Like that dudebro, this film has neither.) Good movies have arresting scenes; Haseen Dillruba has tired and demarcated tracks, like bad Bollywood albums of the ’90s. There’s one for comedy, one for thriller, one where Rani is discontent, one where Rishu is angry, one where Rani has a fling, one where Rishu wants to murder her, and on and on. Every track is accompanied by a background score that tells us how to feel. Sometimes, the music kicks in before the actors can emote; sometimes it drowns their emotions. And when the background score is inadequate, we get one song after the other explaining the already explained. This doesn’t feel like a film as much as a bottom-line conscious PowerPoint presentation.

It’s also incapable of original thinking, stuck in the mire of stereotypes. Take, for instance, Neel (Harshvardhan Rane), Rishu’s cousin, who seduces Rani. It’s not enough that he’s different from her husband, he must be a diametrically opposite conception: He has long locks, tattoos, a French beard; smokes a joint, lifts weights, flirts. Even the subplot centered on Rani and the investigating cop is replete with red herrings (“women like these are so cunning”) and forced farce, for when Rani is telling her story, the cops line up near the door like obedient listeners.

But the most annoying part about Haseen Dillruba is its inordinate self-belief. If the first half revels in (non-existent) humour, then the second half simmers with feelings of Intense Love, repeating and hammering the kind of juvenilia even teenagers outgrow, “If it’s not madness, it’s not love.” With such consistent hollow writing, it only seems fair, then, that a crucial part of the movie revolves around a severed hand. Some jokes are written by screenwriters; some by the exasperated audiences forced to endure them.

‘Dolly Kitty Aur Woh Chamakte Sitare’ Is About Unfullfilled Desires in a Small Town

Alankrita Srivastava’s second film is full of telling details but has some false and contrived touches.

Alankrita Shrivastava’s latest, Dolly Kitty Aur Woh Chamakte Sitare, is a drama about appearance and deception: who we are, and what we hide. Whether it’s the principal – Dolly (Konkana Sensharma) and Kaajal (Bhumi Pednekar) – or the ancillary ones, such as Dolly’s younger son and Kaajal’s love interest (Vikrant Massey), they’re all playing the game of hide and seek. What needs to be sought first needs to be hidden, as desire has eluded them for so long that it has become taboo-like. And then there’s Greater Noida, the film’s setting, a city doing some hiding itself: in this jungle of towering buildings, there are beasts aplenty, telling people who, how and where to love.

Dolly’s cousin, Kaajal, has come from a small town in Darbhanga, Bihar, to earn a living in the city. But a dignified life still remains out of reach. She works in a shoe factory, as an assembly-line worker, where her boss insults her. At home, her brother-in-law, Amit (Aamir Bashir), touches her inappropriately. Fed-up of constant dehumanisation, Kaajal moves out and finds a new job. The new work, for a dating app, involves talking to strangers over phone, alleviating their loneliness and satiating their lust. Kaajal is both the beneficiary and the victim of gig economy.

Dolly, on the other hand, has a seemingly perfect life: a job, a husband, two kids and aspirations of a glitzy future: the couple has recently booked a flat in a swanky apartment. Yet Dolly – or “Mrs. Yadav”, we don’t know her formal name till the very end – is as dissatisfied. Her colleagues are sexist – she’s expected to make tea for them every morning. She hasn’t had sex in two years. She hustles money from her office to pay for the flat’s monthly instalment. But Dolly, too, benefits from the gig economy. She orders food from a restaurant and befriends the delivery personnel, a young man named Osman Ansari (Amol Parashar).

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A portion of the film’s title – “chamakte sitaare [sparkling stars]” – is a hat-doff to the precarious nature of that work: the stars awarded by consumers to service providers, the metric that determines their worth, the only thing twinkling in their lives. Before watching the film, I mistakenly assumed that the titular stars were literal – a cosmic representation of desire – but I had forgotten that in a city engulfed by the smoke of forest fire for at least two months, the only stars visible are the ones on phone.

The film plays with a few other metaphors, too – none of them ‘highbrow’, and that’s precisely the point. Small worries acquire big meanings here. The first is the air conditioner (“AC”) – the eternal symbol of Indian upward mobility. Dolly’s house doesn’t have an AC, neither does her workplace, but when she finds out that Kaajal works in an air-conditioned office – and that the company cab provides a ‘pick up and drop’ service – she’s stung by a tinge of envy. There’s something, after all, at the end of nothing, and Dolly wants her share: a ‘modular kitchen’, a fancy kitchen tap, an airy balcony. Dolly, though, is not unidimensional. Shrivastava, also the film’s screenwriter, sees her with impressive empathy and clarity.

Like the AC, the words ‘I love you’ and the colour red recur throughout the film. Dolly, still a virgin, is pestered by countless men to say “I love you” – a phrase used so often, and so mechanically, that it feels as if the real machine is not the app but its users. Even red – a symbol of love and passion – is present all around, yet elusive: Kaajal holds a rose during an intimate conversation, which is soon crushed; the name of the app (well, ‘Red Rose’); her work desk is shot via a red filter; the colour of Dolly’s bedsheet and pillows, the only colour in her life.

Dolly Kitty Aur Woh Chamakte Sitare’s biggest achievement is that it looks and feels real. The excellent production design (by Tiya Tejpal) is a recognition of the middle-class scramble. Dolly’s house is suffocated by furniture, a dance of exhibition and desperation – a sign of being there, and yet not quite. Just like her future house, like Kaajal’s “boyfriend”, like Greater Noida itself. This is a story of (literally and metaphorically) living on the edge, of people in transit, always in a state of arriving, always consumed by plans.

The main actors help Shrivastava realise her vision. Pednekar, who excels at portraying vulnerable characters, is impressive, encapsulating the varying shades of an outsider’s journey. Dolly, a jaded wife at the start of the film, has an opposite trajectory: she’s trying to regain her innocence. Sharma melds the different aspects of her character – of a wife, mother, sister, lover – smoothly, largely maintaining a credible front. The only disappointment is Bashir, who struggles to nail the Bihari diction and, due to weak writing, seems clichéd.

The film, like its central characters, is not short on ambition. Which is indeed heartening, but that scope also overwhelms Shrivastava, resulting in some contrived plot turns and sloppy and ‘shocking’ scenes, such as the one between Dolly and her mother, Kaajal’s friend having sex with her boyfriend in her presence, Kaajal and her ‘boyfriend’ getting picked by the cops, she extracting ‘revenge’ on him, and another crucial plot twist at the end. Even the angle of Hindutva goons feels like a prop, popping in and out of the story. Besides, the subplot centred on Dolly’s younger son – who is more interested in dolls and feminine attire – is quite similar to Zoya Akhtar’s Bombay Talkies short, right down to Katrina Kaif’s poster in the boy’s room. It may well be a homage (given that she and Akhtar have collaborated in the past, for the web series Made in Heaven), but even then, Shrivastava’s piece revolves around that idea, doesn’t take it forward.

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But despite occasional flaws – and the fact that it has more false notes than her debut, Lipstick Under My Burkha – this is a very impressive sophomoric effort: it tries more, it risks more, it expands the filmmaker’s intellectual curiosity. Dolly Kitty Aur Woh Chamakte Sitare (almost) glows with the charm of literary journalism – it is an examination of quiet desires, an immersive account of people considered too insignificant for news.

And as always, Shrivastava’s attention to detail is gobsmacking, slaying the audience with a touch so fine that they crave more. At one point, Kaajal is out on a date with Pradeep (Massey). She’s met him for the first time; it’s a blissful afternoon, they are in Agra, on a rooftop café overlooking Taj Mahal. They’re both nervous, and when he’s just taken his seat, Kaajal, unasked, reverts to the role she best knows – of a caregiver, of a server, a conditioning both personal and professional – and she simply asks, “Paani dein [Should I serve you water]?”, unmindful of the fact that, in a restaurant, it is she who should be served. The one doing the ultimate deceiving then is Shrivastava’s movie, where a glass of water contains an ocean of subdued storm.

The film has been released on Netflix.