When Raat Akeli Hai: The Bansal Murders dropped on Netflix, the first question on everyone’s mind was inevitable: is this based on something that actually happened? The trailer alone—with its eerie family massacre and ritualistic undertones—felt uncomfortably familiar, like a headline you’d scrolled past but couldn’t quite place.
The short answer is no, this isn’t a straight retelling of any single real-life case. But the longer, more interesting answer? This film lives in that unsettling space where fiction borrows heavily from reality’s darkest corners.
In a Nutshell:
Netflix’s Raat Akeli Hai: The Bansal Murders is not based on a single true story, but draws inspiration from multiple real-life incidents including the 2018 Burari deaths and industrial gas leak tragedies like the 2020 LG Polymers disaster. Director Honey Trehan confirms the film reflects societal realities while remaining a fictional narrative. The movie explores themes of class inequality, faith exploitation, and corporate negligence through the lens of a murder mystery.
What the Filmmakers Actually Said
Director Honey Trehan was refreshingly candid during a Netflix media session in Mumbai. He didn’t dance around the question of real-life inspiration—he simply reframed it. “The people who exist around us—whether today or in the past—their lives, struggles, circumstances, and behaviour shape a story,” he explained. “Many small experiences and incidents come together to form a big, impactful narrative.”
It’s the kind of answer that acknowledges what we all suspect: no crime thriller exists in a vacuum, especially not one set in contemporary India. Writer Smita Singh conceived this as what Trehan calls “a mirror into society,” drawing from the collective anxiety of a nation that’s witnessed its share of inexplicable tragedies.
Nawazuddin Siddiqui, returning as the dogged Inspector Jatil Yadav, added that the writer’s room incorporated several real-life incidents into the narrative. They weren’t copying homework—they were synthesizing it, creating something that feels authentic without being bound to factual accuracy.
Must Read: Raat Akeli Hai: The Bansal Murders Review A Gripping but Uneven Return to Dark Mystery
The Burari Shadow That Looms Over Everything
Here’s where things get interesting. Early in the film, a news channel covering the Bansal massacre explicitly mentions the Burari deaths—a direct nod that’s impossible to ignore. For anyone who lived through July 2018, that case remains seared into memory: eleven members of the Chundawat family found hanging in their Delhi home, the ritualistic staging, the disturbing diary entries that suggested they believed they’d survive.
The Burari tragedy wasn’t a murder. It was a mass suicide orchestrated through manipulation and shared delusion, with Lalit Chundawat convincing his family that his late father’s spirit had given them a path to salvation. The psychological unraveling, the notebooks filled with cryptic instructions, the sheer incomprehensibility of an entire family walking willingly into death—it shook India in a way few cases have.
So yes, there are echoes in the Bansal case. The film’s antagonist, Om Prakash, deliberately stages the murders to mimic ritualistic killing, knowing full well that investigators’ minds would leap to Burari-like explanations. He kills crows as part of the staging, banking on the assumption that people would believe the Bansals were involved in black magic or spiritual practices gone wrong.
But here’s where the film diverges significantly: the Bansal case is a murder mystery with a revenge motive rooted in corporate negligence. Om Prakash’s daughter died in a gas leak at a rubber manufacturing plant owned by the Bansal family, and his elaborate staging is about misdirection, not belief. The film uses Burari as cultural shorthand—a reference point that exists in the collective consciousness—rather than as a blueprint.
When Trehan was asked directly about the Burari connection, he neither confirmed nor denied it. “All my films have characters inspired by real life, and that will be the case even with any of my work in the future,” he said, essentially inviting audiences to draw their own conclusions. It’s a smart deflection that acknowledges the elephant in the room without being beholden to it.
The Gas Leak That Nobody Talks About Enough
If Burari provides the film’s psychological texture, industrial disasters provide its backbone of class critique. The inciting incident—the death of Om Prakash’s daughter in a gas leak at the Bansal family’s rubber plant—isn’t pulled from thin air.
On May 7, 2020, while much of India was locked down during the pandemic, a styrene gas leak at LG Polymers in Visakhapatnam killed 15 people and hospitalized hundreds. It was the kind of tragedy that should have sparked nationwide outrage—poor quality tanks, lax safety protocols, negligent employees, regulatory failure at multiple levels. The CEO and technical director were eventually charged, along with several employees, but the damage was irreversible.
The film doesn’t replicate this incident exactly. In the Bansal case, it’s children in a classroom who die—a detail that makes the tragedy even more visceral. But the underlying critique is identical: in India’s rush toward industrial growth, it’s always the poor who pay with their lives. Slum dwellers, daily wage workers, children whose schools are built too close to hazardous plants—their deaths barely register as news beyond a 48-hour cycle.
The film captures something painfully true about class dynamics in India. The Bansals wield enough influence to ensure the gas leak never becomes a major scandal. Media coverage is minimal, investigations are quietly shelved, and life goes on for everyone except the families of the dead. As Trehan noted, this movie is fundamentally about “the rising wealth gap and the sociological components that shape and reinforce class inequalities.”
The Long Shadow of Industrial Negligence in India
The LG Polymers case wasn’t an isolated incident—it’s part of a pattern that stretches back decades. In 2017, a sugar mill in Shamli was found discharging hazardous waste near a private school, causing students to suffer from stomach aches and nausea. In November 2025, just a month before the film’s release, a gas leak at Lions Public School in Hardoi sent children to the hospital, though fortunately there were no fatalities.
These incidents keep happening because the fundamental calculus hasn’t changed. Neither private companies nor government bodies want to invest in proper hazardous waste management, robust emergency protocols, or specialized crisis response teams. It’s expensive, it’s unglamorous, and until something catastrophic happens, it’s easy to ignore.
The film uses fiction to force us to sit with this uncomfortable reality. Om Prakash’s daughter didn’t have to die. The classroom full of children didn’t have to be exposed to toxic gas. These deaths were preventable, the result of choices made by people who knew better but prioritized profit and convenience over safety.
Guru Ma and India’s Godman Problem
Then there’s Geeta Vohra, the spiritual leader character played with unsettling serenity, who goes by “Guru Ma.” While not based on any specific individual, she embodies a very real archetype that’s plagued India for decades: the self-proclaimed religious leader who accumulates wealth and power while claiming spiritual humility.
We’ve all seen them. The godmen (and godwomen) who run trusts worth billions, who count politicians and industrialists among their devotees, who promise healing and salvation while living in luxury that would make monarchs blush. Some have been exposed as frauds running elaborate cons. Others have been convicted of sexual assault, financial crimes, or both. Yet they continue to thrive because faith is a powerful shield and people desperately want to believe.
What makes Guru Ma particularly interesting is her international reach—she’s established an ashram in South Korea, suggesting her operations extend far beyond India. The film implies she’s running something larger and darker than your typical spiritual scam, with powerful backers ensuring she remains untouchable.
The Bansal family holds the power of attorney for their rubber plant under Guru Ma’s name, a detail that could implicate her in Om Prakash’s revenge plot. Did he know about this connection and want to frame her? Or was it coincidental, his ritualistic staging accidentally pointing toward an actually corrupt spiritual leader?
How the Film Plays With Our Expectations
What’s clever about Raat Akeli Hai: The Bansal Murders is how it weaponizes our familiarity with real-life cases. The film knows that Indian audiences carry Burari in their minds, that we’ve been conditioned to expect certain explanations when we see ritualistic elements.
Meera Bansal, one of the survivors played by Chitrangada Singh, speaks in ways that deliberately evoke Lalit Chundawat’s mindset. She talks about her family being “liberated from the mortal realm,” about souls transcending, about how modern generations don’t understand that pain is inevitable. She suffers from acute PTSD following her son’s death, just as Lalit was believed to suffer from mental health issues triggered by his father’s death and a violent assault.
For the first portion of the film, you’re meant to suspect Meera conspired with Guru Ma to kill her family, mirroring the Burari dynamic. It’s only as the investigation unfolds that the truth emerges: this was revenge dressed up as ritual, exploitation dressed up as faith.
Singh described her character as appearing “calm and composed from the outside, but inside she lives with fear and deep anxiety… She has many unspoken truths.” It’s a performance that walks a knife’s edge, making you constantly question what Meera knows and when she knew it.
Why Fiction Sometimes Tells Deeper Truths
Siddiqui, in an interview with PTI, said something that cuts to the heart of what this film is trying to do: “We make fantasy or larger-than-life films, but what I like the most is the real-life stories.” Every choice his character makes—body language, dialogue delivery, even how silence is used—was designed to feel authentic.
The paradox is that by not being bound to a specific true story, the film can comment more freely on broader societal failures. It can combine the psychological manipulation of Burari with the corporate negligence of Visakhapatnam, add in the godman phenomenon and class inequality, and create something that feels truer than a straight docudrama might.
Trehan’s previous film, the original Raat Akeli Hai, explored Jatil’s patriarchal beliefs and how they colored his investigation. This sequel uses the same character to examine how wealth creates its own reality, how the powerful can literally get away with murder (or in this case, with the conditions that lead to preventable deaths).
The Question the Film Leaves You With
So is Raat Akeli Hai: The Bansal Murders based on a true story? Not in the way Talvar is based on the Aarushi Talwar case, or The Kerala Story claims to document real events (however dubiously). But it’s based on something perhaps more unsettling: the truth that these things happen, that they keep happening, and that the mechanisms protecting the powerful while grinding down the vulnerable are very much real.
The Burari deaths happened. The Visakhapatnam gas leak happened. Fraudulent spiritual leaders continue to operate with impunity. Schools near industrial areas continue to expose children to hazardous conditions. These aren’t inventions—they’re the raw material of contemporary Indian life.
What the film does is take these disparate threads and weave them into a narrative that asks: what happens when all of these failures—systemic, corporate, spiritual, judicial—intersect in a single family’s tragedy? And perhaps more importantly: how many real families have suffered from these intersecting failures while we were too busy to notice?
The genius of using fiction here is that it forces us to sit with these questions without the distraction of debating factual accuracy or defending specific people. It’s not about whether this exact sequence of events occurred. It’s about whether we recognize the world the film is showing us—and whether we’re willing to acknowledge that recognition means something uncomfortable about the society we’ve built.
