The Butcher of Delhi: Take a thrill pill

Ayesha Sood’s 'Indian Predator: The Butcher of Delhi', the latest crime drama on Netflix, blends fiction and nonfiction. (Image: screen grab)

Why do people kill? Unless we are the killers, this is a question that keeps us up at night, fancying ourselves as Sherlock Holmes, Agatha Christie, Perry Mason, Byomkesh Bakshi, Karamchand or the plain old nosy aunty in the house next door. The new buffet of dramatised whodunits focuses on real-life incidents, but still under pressure to maintain the masala element.

Serialisation becomes addictive typically when the murder, the murdered and the murderer come together in a blood-bath symphony where we have a ringside view not only to the gory proceedings, but to the modus operandi, legal goof-ups and the psychobabble.

We are always one step ahead of the murderer, and yet the murderer catches us napping – it is a cat and mouse game between them and us. The camera gives us all the right angles, the music brings out the goosebumps – and we demand that impossible balance between recreated scenes and suspense.

Once we make peace with being bloodthirsty viewers, we sit back jaded but savagely curious. We have seen the headlines, and are here to hear something new about an old story.

There are three main types: docu-dramas that go for the all-real format, where an endless number of neighbours, friend’s friends, distant relatives queue up to chat, with policemen and lawyers popping in and out of the proceedings to lend authenticity; the completely fictionalised version, with well-known actors enacting the actual homicide, emotionalising the events; and then there is a judicious, if subjective, mix of what we know and what we don’t. Satires like American Vandal come in too.

Betty Broderick killed her ex-husband in 1989 and has had at least two outings on American screens. A Woman Scorned in 1992 had Meredith Baxter and Dirty John in 2020 had Amanda Peet as Betty. TV series Des saw David Tennant play serial killer Dennis Nilsen. Meghna Gulzar’s film Talvar too left us to decide the criminal’s identity while evoking the Aarushi Talwar case.

House of Secrets: The Burari Deaths on Netflix took the reality road, but managed to maintain a creepy ambience on the subject of mass suicide. Ayesha Sood’s The Butcher of Delhi, the latest crime drama on Netflix, blends fiction and nonfiction. The crime itself is chilling – labourer Chandrakant Jha, who moved to Delhi from Bihar to make a living, went on a killing spree 15 years ago, scattering the severed body parts nonchalantly around town. He would also make phone calls to policemen, bad-mouthing them with a ‘catch me if you can’ air.

With graphic recreations, police talks and expert views, this true crime documentary easily goes into the whydunit genre, where the identity of the killer is known but tracks his motivations and actions. Which makes the going tougher for the makers. Drama in real life does dissipate against the mundane and mediocre, but in cinematic language it is a prime requirement along with background scores and sudden scares. The Butcher of Delhi, by treading the path of methodical structuring, is tangled up in its own earnestness. The earthing doesn’t always provide a charge.

Murderers, alas, get more press than their victims. In this case, the dead are anonymous, poor and rarely missed after the slaughter. Too much of the why and the how and the who obscure the ‘what?’