Indian Predator: The Butcher of Delhi: Frustrating Netflix true crime series retells a chilling case without any purpose

Indian Predator: The Butcher of Delhi — the latest entry to Netflix’s true crime canon — follows a frustrating template seemingly set by the streaming platform’s Indian true crime outings. Like Crime Stories: Indian Detectives, House of Secrets: The Burari Deaths, A Big Little Murder, and Delhi Crime, the series builds itself around a gruesome, headline-grabbing case and then proceeds to use the police investigation to paint a selective portrait of the societal inequalities that breeds criminals. The direction is frustrating only because it betrays narrative clarity. Which is to say that in their attempt to cover multiple vantage points of one single crime, these documentaries overcrowd their own narratives, often rushing through points instead of making any. The result is an average true-crime outing where the storytelling is far less thrilling than the story at the center of it.

Take Indian Predator: The Butcher of Delhi for instance. The three-episode series tracks a case whose beats seem tailor-made for television. The subject is Chandrakant Jha, a ruthless serial killer who strangled young men, dismembered their bodies, and then scattered the body parts all around Delhi, making it nearly impossible for the cops to nab him. Although Jha is said to have carried out his first murder in 1998, he only caught the attention of the Delhi Police between 2003 and 2007, a period during which he committed six murders.

Part of the reason the case became all the more blood-curling was Jha’s signature style: after killing his victims, Jha would leave a sizable portion of their mutilated dead bodies right outside Tihar Jail. Two of these bodies — one victim was beheaded, the other had no limbs — were accompanied by handwritten notes in which he cockily challenged the cops to find him. More than once, he is said to have called the west Delhi police station to inform them about a dead body lying outside Tihar jail, enraged at the fact that the cops were not doing their jobs.

Despite the horrific nature of his crimes, Jha, a Bihari migrant, flew under the media’s radar presumably due to the socioeconomic status of both victims and perpetrator. As daily wage laborers, Jha and his victims — migrants like him — occupied the lowest rung of society, invisibilized not only while they were alive but also in death. That alone makes the existence of Indian Predator: The Butcher of Delhi, a series that seeks to re-examine his case, all the more compelling.

The trouble is that the storytelling — the series is directed by Ayesha Sood — doesn’t come close to doing justice to any of it. For much of its almost two-hour runtime, it meanders, introducing new threads without tying together already existing loose ends. Indian Predator: The Butcher of Delhi for instance, opens in 2006 — on the day Jha dumped Anil Mandal’s headless body in front of Tihar jail. A quick montage, stacked with news recordings, b-roll footage, first-hand testimonies, audio and video recreations, offers context. All of it makes it seem as if this is Jha’s first murder and the first time cops hear about him. It’s only later in the episode that Sood breaks that assumption, disclosing that Jha committed a similar murder back in 2003 that the Delhi police claim they couldn’t solve. At no point during the series, does Sood go back to dig into the one question that arises out of this newly-revealed information: Why did the investigation head nowhere and more crucially, was there ever an investigation?

On paper, the episodes follow a familiar pattern: the first dedicated itself to presenting the facts of the investigation through the perspective of the police officers who were instrumental in arresting him; the second zooms out and travels back to Jha’s village, attempting to paint a portrait of the man behind the murderer; the third focuses on the discovery of troubling, new evidence that remained out of the reach of the investigating officers for decades.

But on screen, neither of these episodes flow as cohesively. By which I mean that each of the three episodes jump back and forth between timelines and pieces of information to a point where it starts repeating itself. The series succeeds neither as an effective portrait of a serial killer nor as a gripping retelling of an unimaginable investigation. The unimaginative filmmaking (the editing fails to maintain pace) is to blame given how evidently it leans into over-exposition. More than once in the series, two different interview subjects parrot the exact same information, which is repeated again in a matter of minutes.

Sood makes a habit of showing and telling: in the otherwise competent first episode, we watch the contents of Jha’s letter spell out the grudge he held against police officers after being falsely implicated in a few criminal cases. Then, we hear an audio recreation of an actor voicing Jha reading out the exact words that are written on the letter, which should ideally be enough of an indication for the reasoning behind his crimes. Still, the next scene has a former top cop look at the camera and relay the same information — twice.

In that sense, the underwhelming unfolding of Jha’s serial-killing spree is a direct fallout of Sood’s overt reliance on talking heads — most of whom feel poorly chosen (Sood doesn’t have access to either Jha, his family members or the family members of his victims). There are two former cops recounting the turns of the investigation (Sood makes it sound like it was a race against time when it really was a four-year-long affair.) often giving overlapping testimonies. Given that news of Jha’s eventual arrest and sentencing is publicly available —in 2013, the serial killer was given the death sentence, which was later reduced to life imprisonment — the presence of two police officers seems like an editorial oversight. An anonymous police informant and murder accused are unnecessarily thrown in the mix for a brief second even though the point they make is better made by the testimonies of a journalist and cop.

Then there’s a social scientist who claims to not be an “expert on mental health” but proceeds to offer his two (unqualified) cents about the deteriorating mental health of migrants, theorizing whether it could have played a part in the making of a murderer (curiously, there’s no testimony of an actual mental health expert). The interview portions that Sood chooses to retain from an eminent forensic scientist, for instance, state the obvious (that he must have committed more murders, presumably grew up in a neglected, perverse environment, and enjoyed being in control).

Most of the time, these testimonies, especially the ones accumulated from residents of Jha’s village and the victims who escaped his wrath, come across as a means to an end — as if they’re inserted so that the makers have an excuse to launch into extended audio and video recreations. Although Sood displays an inherent knack for conjuring up the mood (the title image is a nice touch as is the background music), the recreated sequences end up succumbing to a fair bit of sensationalism. Some parts even look straight out of a tacky Crime Patrol episode.

It made me wish that the filmmaker didn’t spoon-feed viewers with this much visual imagery, letting us conjure up the disturbing picture of Jha’s depravity in our heads instead (a sensational sequence that suggests that Jha is mercilessly murdering someone had more of an effect than the several ones in which we see him killing someone). I say that only because the findings of the third episode — a photo album that implicated Jha in more than 50 murders and the fearful testimonies of the villagers — are chilling on their own.

In fact, the cultural psychoanalysis that Indian Predator: The Butcher of Delhi frequently concerns itself with rings hollow primarily because of its visible resistance to questioning authority. A storyteller choosing to not take sides to maintain objectivity is an admirable journalistic principle but a filmmaker neglecting to demand accountability for visible systemic missteps is a glaring letdown. Sood lets off the cops too easy, letting them reiterate time and again the difficulties that the case posed — not once does the series loudly wonder whether Jha could have been stopped before had the Delhi Police solved the 2003 murder. Even when the proceedings makes it clear that Jha challenged the system because he was once tortured inside prison, there is no commentary about the need for police reforms.

Toward the end of the third episode, a heartbreaking moment captures Mandal’s wife and teen son revealing that corrupt cops misled them into believing that he was alive inside prison for several years. The mother-son duo barely make ends meet but spent several years bribing police officers so that they could arrange a meeting with Mandal. Only recently were they informed about his death — and the circumstances around it. “Are we not human?” his teen son asks, angered that the cops didn’t even think of informing his family after identifying his dead body.

This scene alone is a powerful indictment of a police state that tramples over the lowest sections of society. But the testimony of a police officer in the next scene quickly undoes the effect of the moment. In it, he admits that systemic injustices occur against people like Mandal but quickly denies that something like that could have happened in their handling of this case. That the series is content with endorsing the official version of events couldn’t be anymore obvious. It’s exactly why Indian Predator: The Butcher of Delhi lacks the thrills.

Indian Predator: The Butcher of Delhi is streaming on Netflix

Poulomi Das is a film and culture writer, critic, and programmer. Follow more of her writing on Twitter.

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