What Is the Story About?
Prem Singh, after overcoming a traumatic childhood, is now a loyal servant to an influential businessman Balbir. Ram Charan Pandey is a righteous cop who means well but is perennially stressed due to work pressure. When several children go missing from a slum in their area – Sector 36 – all fingers point towards Prem and Balbir. How far can Pandey go to nab the culprits?
Performances?
Though this isn’t the first time that Vikrant Massey is portraying a dark role, what helps is the normalcy and mundanity with which he goes about playing Prem – where the role’s backstory resides in his head but isn’t necessarily communicated to the viewer. His internal trauma and restlessness are reflected primarily through his body language and seamless dialogue delivery. There’s little doubt that this is among his best works.
One of the most unexpected yet most effective casting choices is Deepak Dobriyal as the cop – he springs a surprise with the intensity he brings to the performance, playing an officer who’s brash but doesn’t think twice about doing the right thing. He doesn’t put a foot wrong and proves the industry what he’s capable of.
The other actors – from Akash Khurana to Darshan Jariwala, Baharul Islam and Ipshita Chakraborty Singh – pack a punch, complementing the leads superbly.
Analysis
Sector 36, directed by Aditya Nimbalkar, isn’t your typical crime drama that tries to please your conscience through a righteous protagonist who triumphs over the bad guy. More than the crime and its modus operandi, it offers a chilling portrait of the system that’s designed to guard the elite rather than coming to the rescue of a victim. Those who dare to question or try to change the norm will not be spared.
Ram Charan Pandey is a hot-headed, overworked cop supervising three officers who oversee an area comprising 3 lakh people. A constable hasn’t headed home for over 8 months due to the work overload. To a point, Pandey pays little heed to parents who complain about their missing children. Until danger knocks on his door and his daughter is nearly kidnapped, he doesn’t take the trafficking cases too seriously.
While there’s a predator and a servant who collectively prey on young children, abuse them, chop their bodies and dump them in a sewer, the true antagonist in the film is the system. Those who bow down to the creme de la creme are honoured and rise through the ranks whereas the rest are ‘rewarded’ with suspensions or killed. Criminals are let loose easily, evidence gets tampered with conveniently.
Borrowing a leaf out of Ram Gopal Varma’s gangster sagas, Sector 36 comes up with a humanised portrayal of perpetrators – there’s more to their world beyond the crime. For instance, Prem can’t get through the night without an episode of KBC. The film tries to understand where his bitterness stems from – whether it’s the ghosts of his past, the class hierarchy or the discriminative society he’s a part of.
Beyond the crimes, Sector 36 sends a shiver down your spine when the culprit doesn’t exhibit any sense of remorse and elaborates on his crimes in detail as if it were a mundane act. The film neither tries to philosophise his motive nor glorifies the sincerity of the cop. The narrative remains a mute witness without a suggestive tone – leaving it for the viewer to decide who’s the real monster out there.
The film builds the tension in the story quite organically. It’s an open drama, where there’s no beating around the bush and the true intent of the characters comes to the fore in no time. There are no major revelations that turn the film’s world upside down. However, what’s scarier is its attempt to portray the manipulative nature of the human psyche – prone to greed, lust and one who could go to any length to protect himself.
There’s no ray of hope or a forced happy ending in Sector 36, it’s no sugar-coated pill. It effectively dramatises a few real events (Nithari case) and steps into the shoes of the parties involved, taking a few creative liberties. This is the kind of filmmaking that we need more of, where spoon-feeding isn’t deemed necessary and the storyteller respects the viewer’s intelligence and trusts them to understand the subtext.
Music and Other Departments?
Ketan Sodha’s score is as precise and fly-on-the-wall-ish as the filmmaking, merging with the story perfectly. Dhunkey, Kanishk Seth, Gourov Dasgupta and OAFF(Savera) use the dense material to churn out several memorable songs, prompting the viewer to look beyond the surface. Saurabh Goswami’s cinematography and veteran Sreekar Prasad’s finesse on the editing table are another icings on the cake.
Highlights?
Vikrant Massey, Deebak Dobriyal’s performances
Incisive storytelling, going beyond the staple ingredients of the crime drama genre
The dramatisation of true events
Drawbacks?
The haunting, exploitative imagery
Slips into the docu-mode occasionally
Did I Enjoy It?
Yes
Will You Recommend It?
A must-watch for crime-drama enthusiasts
Sector 36 Movie Review by Binged Bureau
We’re hiring!
We are hiring two full-time junior to mid-level writers with the option to work remotely. You need to work a 5-hour shift and be available to write. Interested candidates should email their sample articles to [email protected]. Applications without a sample article will not be considered.
