Sacred Games Coming to Netflix this Summer

The much anticipated eight-part Sacred Games series directed by Anurag Kashyap and Vikramaditya Motwane will premiere this July.

Based on the critically acclaimed book by Vikram Chandra, we will track policeman Sartaj Singh (Saif Ali Khan) following an anonymous tip that offers an opportunity to capture the infamous criminal overlord of the G-Company Ganesh Gaitonde (Nawazuddin Siddiqui). Singh’s endeavours will be told alongside the story of Gaitonde’s rise to power.

Drawing together gangsters, film stars, politicians, spies and terrorists in one opaque game of chess, this adaptation promises to be the reason they installed that ‘skip intro’ button. The board for this game? At first, Mumbai, with the spectre of nuclear weapons and painful memories of the violent 1947 partition, but as we find ourselves further down the rabbit hole, the saga appears to be a part of something much wider. Globalisation, after all, is for crime as well as cars.

Everything on television at the moment is described as gritty, but trust me, this will make Collateral seem positively cheery, and the two pronged approach to storytelling should back compelling action with a real depth of character. If the book is anything to go by then you, like Singh, will soon realise that it is not always so obvious who is a pawn, and who is a king.