A brilliant, nerve-racking investigative series

It is almost as if they were all I hanging in peace, an officer of the Crime Branch investigating this rarest of rare cases tells the filmmakers. Hanging in peace a most telling phrase under any circumstance. In the context of a family, 11 members of which were found hanging in the living room of their house in Delhi one summer morning, it is unsettling. And that ‘unsettling' — is the one word that probably best describes Leena Yadav's terrific and terrifying new docu-series.

- SHANTANU RAY CHAUDHURI

Though advertised as a 'true crime' series, House of Secrets by and large eschews tropes of that genre to create a harrowing picture of not only a family, but an entire society, gone all wrong. It's at the same time an epitaph, a dirge for the myth of the great Indian joint family. As a psychologist observes, this family was only ‘an extreme version of what we are in most families’.

New Delhi, circa 2018. Aspiring to be a millennial city. A city of malls, multiplexes, intricate metro linkages and flyovers, towering high-rises, shining lights. Burari — all narrow lanes, unauthorised colonies, twisted electricity cables hanging overhead, barely 20 kilometres from the city's nerve centre Connaught Place — could well belong to another era. One of the many strengths of the series lies in the way Yadav captures the locality — its geography and its people.