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I recently watched sector 36, a Netflix film starring our favorite actor, Vikrant Massey. The film is remarkable in its portrayal of trauma patterns. Spoiler alerts are every where, starting now.

Massey plays a servant, Prem, who works for a corrupt, womanizing old man named Bassi, played by Akash Khurana. The film opens with Massey‘s character, Prem, hacking the body of a teenage girl who is clearly dead. If you can make it past these scenes, you begin to see a pattern in the way Prem operates.

Then, you discover that he was raped repeatedly by his uncle who ran a butcher shop. Therefore, Prem learned how to hack the bodies of animals from a very young age. He also learned to suppress his anger and pain from a very young age due to the abuse by his uncle.

One day, as his uncle was getting ready to rape him once again, Prem grabbed a large knife and began to hack his uncle to pieces. Just as he would have done with an animal carcass, Prem divided up his uncle’s body into different bags and disposed of him. Much later in the story, we learn that Prem also ate part of his uncle’s body and began to develop a taste for human flesh.

In the present day, Prem lives in a small slum-like settlement called Sector 36, in which children go missing all the time. Of course, this is because Prem is abducting them. He is then killing them, raping them post-mortem and hacking their bodies up. He dumps pieces of the corpses in separate bags. We then find out that he is also selling their organs on the black market.

Enter our protagonist, police officer Ram Charan Pandey, played surprisingly well by Deepak Dobriyal. Pandey, just like his fellow police officers, gets paid to look the other way when it comes to missing children cases which are piling up in his jurisdiction. He continues not to give a damn until one day his daughter is almost abducted by Prem. Pandey catches a glimpse of a masked Prem carrying his unconscious daughter, and gives chase, but loses Prem. Prem’s accomplice, a pathology lab worker, who was ready with an ambulance as the getaway vehicle, is later revealed to be the courier and trafficker of the organs. Bassi is probably involved, but we never really find out – more on this later.

Armed with a new sense of justice and urgency, Pandey begins to investigate the missing children cases and this leads him to Bassi. Soon enough, Pandey figures out that Prem is the culprit. Surprisingly, when Pandey brings Prem in for questioning, Prem sits down in front of Pandey and his superior officer and gives a full and very detailed confession.

It is this confession that reveals how well the makers of this film have understood trauma patterns. I want to discuss four points that reveal these patterns, not to mention Massey’s masterful performance.

1. Abuse becomes a norm: whatever you grow up with becomes normal for you – this led to Prem’s confession and speaking so naturally about what he did.
2. Abuse is repeated over and over: you do what is done to you as a result of that norm – in this case, kill, abuse, hack and dispose. Prem compulsively repeated this pattern, even explaining that he craved human flesh from time to time.
3. Emotions are explosive: you vent the emotions that you felt at the times you were abused, as you abuse them – typically rage. Prem was easily angered, as we see in the next point.
4. Notions of love contain abuse  – your abuser is typically someone you know who is supposed to take care of you, as was the case with Prem and his uncle. Prem claimed to love Chumki, a teenage call girl who was pimped by her father to Bassi on a regular basis. Prem wanted sex with Chumki, but she laughed at him, and he immediately angered, and she became another one of his victims.

The film is inspired by true events – perhaps this is most terrifying of all. This also means there is no happy ending. Bassi is able to keep his name clean because he has friends in high political places who protect him at all cost. The organ trafficking racket is preserved, and the cops continue to be paid handsomely. Pandey is apparently murdered and Prem remains in jail. However, there is a ray of light at the very end as the credits appear. The very last scene shows another piece of evidence emerging, so who knows? Perhaps justice is possible after all.