House of Secrets: The Burari Deaths (2021, Netflix)

It was a case that had shocked India and caused a media storm. Imagine walking into a house and being confronted by 11 people, three different generations of the same family, hanging from the ceiling, like the exposed roots of a banyan tree. Is it a suicide or a murder? As an expert in this riveting three-part documentary series says, “the answer is quite complex.” It’s a mix of both.

They were your typical picture perfect family-next-door. A joint family where the grandmother lived with her sons and their wives and children. They were well-liked in the community, successful entrepreneurs, their children played with those next doors, well behaved, on the surface of it, everything was fine. Then why would a seemingly ordinary family just up and kill themselves? That too without any signs of struggle or force.

Through first-hand accounts by the police and special branch investigators who were on the scene and worked on the case, by the reporters who followed the investigation and by close friends and neighbours of the family, the filmmakers have tried to piece together exactly what happened. The ‘why’ part, which comes naturally when confronted by such a shocking situation, is answered by a group of expert therapists that provide their insight by breaking down the family’s behaviour in an effort to explain what really happened.

This is a horrifying yet engaging watch. This series is a deep sociological study into our desi culture of family and keeping family secrets, of the problem with unquestioning obedience under the guise of ‘respect’ and on how mental health is treated in South Asia — it’s not. And an untreated sickness led to a devastating consequence.

House of Secrets: The Burari Deaths looks at the shocking case of a murder-sucide of an entire family while Maid is about a woman trying to escape an abusive relationship. American Murder: The Family Next Door is about marriage, the deception of social media and provides a hard nuanced look at domestic violence

Maid (2021, Netflix)

There’s a reason why this is one of the top trending series on Netflix globally. It’s on track to dethrone the incredibly popular The Queen’s Gambit (2020) as the most-watched miniseries on the streaming platform.

This is a deeply moving, poignant and sensitive portrayal of a woman trying to escape an abusive relationship and start a life for herself and her infant daughter. But she has no education, no money, and no skills.

She ends up at a minimum-wage job at Value Maids and goes through endless bureaucracy to get some help — any help — from the government to cover rent, food and daycare so she can work, but it never seems to be enough. She is constantly struggling. And it almost seems too easy to go back. Especially when her former partner seems keen on mending his ways. But abusers don’t mend their ways that easily, if they ever do.

Soon, you realise that there’s no such thing as ‘safety’ even when you are out of an abusive relationship, especially when you have no money and no support system. You are entirely on your own.

But it must be mentioned here that there are no black-and-white characters, we are shown the devastating backstories that led to abusers being the way they are, but in a way where it is not an excuse for their behaviour. After all, the protagonist went through the same and she didn’t become one.

Maid is based on Stephanie Land’s best-selling memoir Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother’s Will to Survive. Without being preachy, the series sensitively and with surprising accuracy, portrays how insidious emotional abuse is, how difficult it is to prove, the patt ern that abusers follow and how easy it is for victims to slip into that cycle of violence until they find the strength to try and break through it… again

American Murder: The Family Next Door (2020, Netflix)

Even the trailer for this documentary hit hard. The Watts family murder was followed by millions around the globe. They too were the picture-perfect family — online. Yet, the wife and the children ended up dead. Everyone sympathised with the husband, until he confessed to murdering them.

It was exactly the kind of case that attracts the kind of media frenzy that prime time news and true crime specials feed on. While much has been said, there has even been a Dr Phil special, the Netflix documentary American Murder: The Family Next Door, which was authorised by the victims’ family, takes a more sensitive approach.

The filmmaker constructs her narrative entirely out of archival footage. There is the police bodycam footage, surveillance videos inside the house and during the husband, Christopher Watts’ interrogations and eventual confession. With us getting a constant insight into Shanaan’s constant social media updates, it’s also an eerily intimate film, which, in retrospect, seem almost desperate to show how perfect Shanaan’s family is when in reality, her whole life was falling apart.

More than just a murder, it’s a film about marriage and the deception of social media. It also provide a hard, nuanced look at domestic violence.

Published in Dawn, ICON, October 24th, 2021