On demand: "Sector 36"

You may well require a constitution of steel for this queasily compelling true crime riff from writer Bodhayan Roychaudhury and director Aditya Nimbalkar, but it's as far as the Indian cinema has yet travelled in the direction of Peak Fincher - further even than that noted cinephile-provocateur Anurag Kashyap has yet gone. As Sector 36 opens with antagonist Prem (Vikrant Massey), a child killer plaguing the Delhi backstreets in 2005, watching a variant of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, you wonder whether the intention was to overwrite any fond viewer memories of Slumdog Millionaire: here, by stark contrast, is a decidedly feelbad work, a test of mettle and nerve rather than arbitrarily assigned life experience. Perhaps our only hope is that the authorities have assigned their best man to Prem's case, and it's quickly scuppered with the arrival of the faintly complacent Sub-Inspector Pandey: the prefix seems relevant, somehow. As embodied by Deepak Dobriyal, Pandey is introduced turning a blind eye to lesser criminal transgressions than child murder, and initially seems far less perturbed by Prem's butchery - which extends to spiriting away victims under cover of night to sell their organs on the black market - than by the fact worry-wracked and grief-stricken parents are troubling him when he's off-duty. The screen soon clogs with dirty business, ugly emotions and wrong conclusions, like the sewer in which a severed hand is found at an early stage. The cop pursues a missing woman who's been pimped out by her own father. Prem, we learn, is in the employ of a businessman with links to the powers-that-be, which explains why the Sub-Inspector is given the runaround both by the killer and his superiors. Sector 36 was produced for Netflix by horror specialists Maddock Films (who did Stree and its sequel), and you can see exactly why it bypassed cinemas for streaming: it's a tough sell, offering little chance of a happy ending, and unusually critical of and unsparing towards the actions of those in charge, particularly when filming a copshop overrun with cockroaches big and small.

It is also exceptionally committed to telling this story honestly and well. Streaming - home to a thousand and one lurid true crime entertainments, but also more relaxed artistic constraints - has freed Nimbalkar to push his camera into the darker corners of this world, not that we always like what we see there. Control manifests elsewhere, most notably in writing that's generally sharp-eyed around systemic failure; instead of procedural-straight lines, we get blurrier activity, characters running in rings that start to resemble cycles of hell. Your primary takehome - it's not a consolation, exactly - is that the structures of law and order in place at this time weren't especially effective for catching a killer such as this; you see it in the way Pandey is routinely undermined by his superiors, and hear it in a nicely double-jointed line assigned to one of the latter ("if the system approves it, it's right"). Not even Prem, driven by a long-standing grievance against society, a feeling his skills have been overlooked while others have been handed million-crore paydays, cares to remember how many lives he's taken: at the end of the day, these stolen organs are all just money in the bank. The leads work wonders with two varyingly compromised and indifferent characters, raising the possibility the cop will be shocked into some sort of decency (we'd take functionality), and that the taunting killer will face justice. (Massey, who has previously presented on screen as such a nice boy, is worryingly committed to fleshing out someone who confesses to being an enthusiastic cannibal and rapist - the kind of part an actor surely has to wash off every night.) Yet the real backbone here is Nimbalkar's direction, which refuses to look away, self-censor, make pretty or otherwise tidy up the grim detail of this case, as an Indian theatrical release probably would in order to get passed. You may grimace and feel your stomach churn; you may decide Sector 36 isn't the right movie for the mood you're in, tonight or forever. But I'd defy anyone who dares look this way to take their eyes off it beyond a certain point.

Sector 36 is now streaming via Netflix.