'Indian Predator' relies only on sheer drama and gore

Indian Predator: The Butcher of Delhi

Netflix (Documentary)

Director: Ayesha Sood

Rating: 3/5

Netflix has a thing for true-crime documentaries. Series such as 'American Murder: The Family Next Door' and 'Abducted in Plain Sight' are truly gripping and disturbing.

The recently released three-episode series 'Indian Predator: The Butcher of Delhi' is in the same genre, the second Indian true-crime drama after last year's 'House of Secrets: The Burari Deaths'. It chronicles the fitful and jerky investigations by the Delhi police and their eventual nabbing of Chandrakant Jha, an apparently soulless serial killer convicted in 2013 for three (of the several he allegedly committed) brutal murders between 2003 and 2007.

Jha not only butchered his victims mercilessly but also mutilated their bodies and used the body parts to taunt the police for their ostensible inefficiency. With such intriguing material in hand, what does a true-crime aficianodo expect? To walk gingerly through the killer's mind; get a sense of his motives and a feel of his twisted psyche. However, the documentary is disappointing in this aspect and relies more on the sheer brutality of his crimes for drama rather than an intellectual exploration of his mental make-up.

There is an attempt at social commentary — how his biting destitution, the cold and loveless environment he grew up in and his constant struggle with bullies and goons in Delhi's dark alleys must have contributed to his frustration and consequent spiral. But this socio-economic foray remains half-hearted — one gets the feeling the director wanted to pay lip service to this facet before turning the focus back on the blood and the gore.

More frustratingly, the authority figures interviewed in the documentary do not say much — except to reveal, quite unwittingly, how disorderly most police investigations are in India. Curiously enough, a forensic scientist is given the task of psycho-analysing Jha's motives (and his handwriting!) There is also some neat side-stepping of potentially controversial issues such as Jha's accusations of prison torture.

This is not to say the documentary is not engaging — it is, in parts, mostly because of the nature of the crime itself and evidently, that's not to the credit of the makers.