“Every great spy story is also a secret history of bureaucracy;” so observed Zach Dorfman’s rip-roaring Rolling Stone article about a mysterious CIA operative who was embedded so deeply inside the Taliban that he presumably began participating in global terror himself. A thrilling account of international espionage and the human toll that it takes on those tasked with carrying it out, the story also highlighted the flagrant red-tapeism through which life-and-death decisions were made on the operative’s behalf, often without his knowledge. Director Anubhav Sinha’s Netflix series IC 814: The Kandahar Hijack — an immaculately constructed, darkly humorous, and ultimately terrifying exposé of the “babugiri” that routes our lives — plays like an excellent companion piece to that article.
Divided into two halves of three episodes each — the first focuses on the infamous hijacking and the second details the ensuing negotiations — the show owes about as much to the Jason Bourne movies as it does to the satirical sitcom Ji Mantriji. If Farooq Shaikh were alive, he’d have almost definitely found a place among the show’s excellent ensemble. Vijay Varma plays the unfortunate captain of the cursed Indian Airlines flight that was hijacked from Kathmandu in the winter of 1999, while the others — Kumud Mishra, Naseeruddin Shah, Manoj Pahwa, Pankaj Kapur, Dibyendu Bhattacharya, Arvind Swamy, and more —
