Searing ‘Trial by Fire’ Marks Delayed Justice – And One of Netflix India’s Best Yet: TV Review
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Loading... - Ekansh Burman
- 17 Jan 2023
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Detailing a family's fight for justice following Delhi’s devastating Uphaar Cinema disaster, 'Trial By Fire' is one of Netflix India's strongest titles to date.
On the afternoon of June 13, 1997, a fire caused by an improperly maintained transformer broke out in Delhi’s Uphaar Cinema, quietly fumigating an auditorium packed for a first-day screening of flagwaving blockbuster “Border” with carbon monoxide before plunging the room into darkness.
Those scrambling for the exits found multiple code violations standing between them and survival; the balcony doors had been padlocked from the outside to prevent late entry. 59 cinemagoers never saw the light again; over 100 were injured.
“It wasn’t a cinema hall, it was a crematorium,” notes one official in “Trial by Fire,” a necessarily sorrowful but forcefully compelling seven-part dramatization of the blaze and its aftermath, which represents one of Netflix India’s strongest miniseries to date.
At its centre are Neelam and Shekhar Krishnamoorthy (Rajshri Deshpande and Abhay Deol), a representative middle-class couple who are introduced as they wave their son Ujjwal (Abhishek Sharrma) and daughter Unnati (Poorti Jai Agarwal) off to what would ordinarily have been just another matinee. Of the two, it’s Neelam who reacts more violently to news of her children’s deaths, absconding from the funeral to conduct a one-woman investigation into the tragedy.
This quest for justice leads her — and the show — to the gilded doors of the Uphaar’s owners, Gopal and Sushil Ansal, at that point Asia’s biggest property developers, who subsequently spent years deferring any responsibility onto the electricity board and fire services. (The brothers returned to the courts last week, seeking unsuccessfully to halt the show’s release.) Read More…
