The true crime genre racked up the eyeballs globally in 2022, and India was no exception
The Hindu
This is also a genre that has reopened a lot of conversations about ethics, and the respective gazes of the creator and the viewer
Earlier this month, Netflix released Indian Predator: Beast of Bangalore, a three-part documentary and the fourth entry in the ‘Indian Predator’ series. The narrative follows the crimes and capture of Umesh Reddy, a serial killer active in Bengaluru and Chitradurga through the mid-to-late 90s.
ALSO READ ‘Indian Predator: The Diary of a Serial Killer’ review: A chilling exploration into a killer’s mind
Compared to its colleagues in the ‘Indian Predator’ series, Beast of Bangalore is a decidedly middling affair. It doesn’t have the technical finesse of Murder in a Courtroom, the sheer kineticism of Butcher of Delhi or the novelty value of The Diary of a Serial Killer (which featured a new on-camera interview with the killer himself).
But its release towards the end of a crowded year for streaming — all four aforementioned documentaries released in the second half of 2022 — does confirm that Indian streamers are betting big on true crime. This is a genre that’s racking up the eyeballs globally and India is no exception. And it’s not like the sheer volume of entries in this genre is restricted to conventionally structured documentaries like the ‘Indian Predator’ series.
When Netflix released Dahmer, prolific showrunner Ryan Murphy’s fictionalisation of the Jeffrey Dahmer murders, it consistently made the Top 10 in India, too, for a good few weeks. In 2021, Zee5 had released 200 Halla Ho, a film featuring Amol Palekar in a rare Hindi movie appearance, based on the same case (the trial of Akku Yadav, wherein a mob of women allegedly lynched the eponymous gangster, murderer and rapist in broad daylight in a Nagpur courtroom) that spawned Indian Predator: Murder in a Courtroom.
MX Player released the second season of Bhaukaal in January. Bhaukaal is based on the real-life accounts narrated by an IPS officer who was posted in Muzaffarnagar during a turbulent decade in the Uttar Pradesh town’s history. It’s a well-made show with some strong, if occasionally campy, performances, although it does suffer from a heavy Gangs of Wasseypur hangover at times.
If the ‘Indian Predator’ series (and Delhi Crime, which also released its second season in 2022) covers notorious crimes happening in big urban centres, shows like Bhaukaal are dramatising — and at times, fetishising the ‘wild West’ quality of small-town crime in India.
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