Sacred Games: The Netflix Series

“Mumbai is being threatened from every direction — the underworld and the upper echelons of the police force, the past and the present — and it’s up to a doughty, doubtful Sikh cop to fend them off. Saif Ali Khan plays the turbaned inspector Sartaj Singh in a series, based on a novel by Vikram Chandra, that mixes Bollywood energy with a literary style and touches of magical realism.” — “The 30 Best International TV Shows of the Decade,” The New York Times

“With criminal kingpins, authority conspiracies and likeable cop duos, it’s tempting to label Sacred Games as the Indian Narcos – but the first four episodes are more concise and stylishly executed than its Colombian rival. If you’re pining for a fresh, addictive thriller bursting with style, Sacred Games is the perfect excuse to shield from the summer heat.” — Metro (UK).

“I’ve never seen anything like Sacred Games, Netflix’s mesmerizing, addictive eight-part crime thriller adapted from Vikram Chandra’s 2006 novel about Mumbai’s crime underworld… Sacred Games… feels electrifyingly new. Its visual language, its byzantine plotting, its go-for-broke expansiveness are all irresistibly polyglot: Bollywood maximalism meets downbeat Euro noir meets Hollywood gangster epic. This is globalism on the small screen. You can’t take your eyes off of it.” — Taylor Antrim, Vogue (USA).

 “Developed by Netflix India and featuring several major Bollywood stars, Sacred Games is thrilling noir show set in contemporary India and one of the best Netflix original show in years… Religion is largely absent from the American noir of Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett, but the sacred and profane are woven through every scene of Sacred Games. The show looks at the longstanding religious conflicts of India through the lens of crime… Almost every shot is beautiful to look at, even when it’s a gigantic mounds of garbage being set aflame. You’ll want to keep your eyes on the screen.” — Lincoln Mitchell, GQ (USA).

“By setting a high bar Sacred Games is more than phenomenal TV, it’s a shape-shifter… Astutely crafted, Sacred Games urges a socio-political self-examination that extends beyond the entertainment value of a show like Narcos, nearing the introspective genius of The Wire… In the show’s arresting opening shot a snow white dog falls several stories exuding a bloody pool as it lands in bright sunshine next to a group of school children. All that follows hits the same note; beautiful, horrific, poetic, dissonant but above all commanding that we sit up and take notice. Sacred Games is the game changer we’ve been waiting for.” — Soleil Nathwani, Rolling Stone (India).

“[In Sacred Games] the games people play in the name of religion are painted in the gory colours of blood and mayhem and destruction, that’s when they really deliver a gut punch to the solar plexus, sucking the air out of the lungs and bringing us in direct confrontation with the evil that resides within the human race;evil that comes to the fore whenever religion is invoked to satisfy man’s insatiable lust for power and supremacy… Sacred Games… portrays all this and more, in harrowing technicolor and agonizing detail. The magnitude of evil conjured up by mankind in the name of religion, omnipresent throughout the show, makes you recoil in shock and horror. C.S.Lewis once said, “Of all bad men, religious bad men are the worst”. Sacred Games 2 makes the saying come alive in intensely unsettling sequences, choreographing a macabre dance of death and destruction that chills the onlooker to the bone. A mob-lynching scene is particularly terrifying – unnerving in its vividness and brilliant in execution.” — Shweta Keshri, India Today

“We have waited so long to hear that spine-chilling soundtrack once again. And once the title credits started rolling a few minutes after midnight yesterday, it was clear. We were up for something truly spectacular. As India collectively binged through a show all night, we woke up to our 73rd Independence Day and a great day for Indian television… There are scenes which are charged with contemporary Indian political references and this is what makes Sacred Games so bold, so fearless. Gaitonde’s business flourishes and takes us to some of the most exotic locations around the world. It is safe to say that the makers didn’t scrimp when it comes to production value… We loved the thrill and rush of Season 1, and Season 2 has more of that and also delves deep into each character. We understand the method behind the madness and this incredible feat deserves applause. Directors Anurag Kashyap, Neeraj Ghaywan and show runner Vikramaditya Motwane along with the writers have managed to craft a thriller with a so… Sacred Games 2 is a one-sitting watch. The series demands it. It is safe to assume that there will be more to the story than just this, a possible third season? Netflix has given us world-class shows like Narcos and Money Heist and Sacred Games is right up there, in the big leagues. Indian content has finally arrived.” — Sreya Bose, “Sacred Games 2 Review – It’s Bigger, Braver And Yes, Better,” Spotboye (India)

“The show uses the setting of Mumbai, the most extreme and cinematic of Indian cities, borrowing its gangland fights (which split later along communal lines), its riots, glamorous filmstars and sinister governments to tell the story of India’s troubled modernity. And Mumbai doesn’t just serve as a setting. Through Kashyap’s and Motwane’s lens, it becomes a living, breathing and thrashing character of its own. A tight frame focusing on the complexity of a character’s face or a minor moment in an alley often zooms out and pans magisterially across to reveal a large and brooding cityscape of bright towers and dark shanties. There is an existential thread running through the show. Gaitonde often asks if the other believes in God. He wonders sometimes if he himself is divine. Sartaj Singh, a nervous wreck with a broken marriage behind him and an addiction to sleeping pills, wants to be honest. But like life, his principles too are gradually failing him… [Sacred Games] is not a Narcos. It is its own. And like all great stories, Sacred Games is asking us questions through its characters: who are we, why are we here, and what should we do?” — Lhendup G. Bhatia, Open Magazine (India)

“Unfolding like a pulpy retelling of a mythological epic, the second season of Netflix’s Sacred Games is a more complex experience than the first, without ever compromising on the populism that made it such a phenomenon in the first place. It is dense without ever feeling overwhelming, controversial but never sleazy; a thoroughly entertaining example of a television series operating at the peak of its potential… The second season of Sacred Games is a perceptive examination of how individuals work within organisations; of how everyone, regardless of their position, is in some manner or the other controlled by someone else. It is about the banality of evil and the power of religion, and how, brought together, they can produce a chemical reaction of nuclear proportions.” — Rohan Naahar, Hindustan Times (India).

“Killing as a substitute for Sex; Violence that gets mixed with Piety; Blood as a means to activate a soul that fears it is losing its Vigour. Gaitonde can penetrate gangs and cut people open. He also yearns to become an expert kisser. Has there ever been a more Entertaining Monster in the history of the Indian arts? And this arc is inundated with character interactions, treated almost like set pieces. Watching the Gaitonde-Bunty set piece is like watching two jazz players at it… I doubt if there's another actor in the world, right now, who has [Nawazuddin Siddiqui’s] unconscious so completely plugged into his best performances. Nawazuddin brings to life everything from Gaitonde’s clownish-savage innocence to his need to dramatise the self -- but it’s almost as if all that just flows out of him. (In many scenes, I had the weird sensation that Nawazuddin’s body is only a medium to deliver what his unconscious has prepared.) The beautiful thing about this season is that the whole of Sacred Games has been raised to the Nawazuddin Siddiqui Ideal. And so, everything we see on the show seems drawn from some place mysterious, and it gets lodged in some part of our brain that we haven’t tracked down yet. I don’t want to sound religious, especially given the title; but this is shaping up to be one of India’s great cultural events.” — Shreehari Nair, Rediff (India).

“Gaitonde may be dead [at the beginning of the series], but his beloved city thrums with life. And through him we learn the details of Mumbai’s fictionalized-but-mostly-true inner life: its mighty slumlords; a never-ending supply of crooked cops and corrupt politicians; striving actresses exploited every step of the way up; a powerful right-wing Hindu party; and the connective tissue of crime and lust that links them together. Real-life footage of iconic moments in Indian history, such as the riots between Hindus and Muslims after the 1993 Bombay bombings, is spliced in to make Sacred Games feel like a modern history of the metropolis once known as Bombay… The most worrying comparisons, however, are not in how Sacred Games depicts India’s past and present but in how it envisions the country’s near future: an entire security system undermined by bureaucratic graft and ineptitude, where only a great hero can save the place from itself. Beautifully shot and smartly edited, Sacred Games, which launched in June 2018, was Netflix’s first original Indian-made series, generating national publicity for the streaming service.” — Rani Agrawal, Foreign Policy

“There can be no bigger crime than reducing Netflix's Sacred Games, based on Vikram Chandra's 1000 page book, to a gangster drama (it is not Indian Narcos). Sure, it has all the trappings, but Sacred Games season 2 is so much more. Its social, thematic and political relevance smacks you in the face even harder than the ground-breaking first season, adding notches of psychological trauma (caused by the multiple deaths in season 1), communal upheaval and repercussions of war, with a sprinkling of humour, new characters to root for and just the right amount of fun your moral conscience will allow. Before you can laugh at a dialogue or marvel the visual brilliance of a scene, the show reels you back in to looming threat of nuclear terrorism: a fictional premise of the show, but also, a terrifying mirror? 11 episodes in, Sacred Games is more relevant to global socio-cultural politics than even Leila, which found popularity for holding a mirror to the Indian society of today. From being a cat-and-mouse chase between Sartaj Singh and Ganesh Gaitonde (the two main characters of the first season) and the definitive story of the growth of Mumbai, the show has now elevated to a scary thriller that reminds you how strangely close to home fiction can be.” — Swetha Ramakrishnan, Firstpost.

“While it’s essentially a cat and mouse thriller, Sacred Games is also a poignant commentary on the equalizing power of hatred, perhaps the only emotion that is truly “secular” in India. It questions why we associate ourselves so deeply with our religious identity, why we place allegiance to an invisible god over our intuitive humanity, and why inspite of so many years of betrayal and bloodshed we just can’t seem to kick our addiction to our God, who as a character says, got sick of us long ago.” — Saraswati Datar, The News Minute

“As moody as it’s melancholic, as introspective as it is philosophical, Sacred Games 2 sets off on an exploratory voyage where cops and gangsters battle ideas of existentialism and the karmic burden of murder even as the perilous subversion of religion and spirituality continues to feed an ideological project… At a time when bigotry and religious indoctrination has been insidiously mainstreamed, Sacred Games 2 is as instructive as it is enjoyable, a timely drama that critiques blind devotion to kurta-wearing men spewing poisonous rhetoric, all under the garb of spiritual nourishment. Sounds eerily familiar.” — Ankur Pathak, Huffpost

“Issme drama hai, sex hai, dhokha hai, and a liberal dose of history, mythology and philosophy as well. Sacred Games season two, which is way bigger and also better than the first, has all the above-mentioned attributes in abundance… The show is a grim warning, and a reflection of the dark turbulent times that the world and our country is currently facing. The bomb is literally upon us, and if we don’t get our act together, well, we might not have a Sartaj Singh to save us. The eight 50-minute episodes are intense, layered and keep you on edge. Part one was the beginning of the slow burn. By part two, it has simmered to near perfection… By the time part two ends, one feels that one is a participant in this ‘theatre of the absurd’, and all hope is lost. But it is the necessary poison that we all need to partake if we wish for our future generations to even see the light of the day.” — Ektaa Malik, The Indian Express

“Netflix’s first Indian Original series, the first season of Sacred Games became a humongous success and this generally puts an unhealthy amount of pressure on the successor that has to match not just the weight of expectations but deliver a dynamic fresh new punch. Putting all doubts to rest it must be made clear that Sacred Games 2 is totally worth the hype… The ominous nexus between politics and religion is exposed brutally though brilliantly… Speeding up and slowing down the narrative to add in some unexpected twists is a cunning ploy and as things draw to a close one is tempted to imagine that a third season could well be on its way. Sacred Games season 2 is pretty irresistible.” — The Quint