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In the first episode of Netflix India’s newest show, Trial by Fire, Neelam Krishnamoorthy (Rajshri Deshpande) has a heart-to-heart with her now deceased children’s young friend Arjun, who is visibly shaken after having survived a terrible fire at a movie theater. Neelam’s goal is precisely to understand how her beloved Ujjwal (Abhishek Sharrma) and Unnati (Poorti Jai Agarwal) perished in the fire, and how Arjun managed to come out alive. The answers she gets from the boy, however, aren’t exactly what she expected. According to Arjun, the only reason he didn’t succumb to the smoke was because he wasn’t inside the theater at all. He arrived late to find the doors to the auditorium bolted shut. Neelam is, of course, shocked by this information. But little does she know that this is just one of the many horrible details that make up the tragedy...

On the afternoon of June 13, 1997, a fire caused by an improperly maintained transformer broke out in Delhi’s Uphaar Cinema, quietly fumigating an auditorium packed for a first-day screening of flagwaving blockbuster “Border” with carbon monoxide before plunging the room into darkness.

Those scrambling for the exits found multiple code violations standing between them and survival; the balcony doors had been padlocked from the outside to prevent late entry. 59 cinemagoers never saw the light again; over 100 were injured.

“It wasn’t a cinema hall, it was a crematorium,” notes one official in “Trial by Fire,” a necessarily sorrowful but forcefully compelling seven-part dramatization of the blaze and its aftermath, which represents one of Netflix India’s strongest miniseries to date.

At its centre are Neelam and Shekhar Krishnamoorthy (Rajshri Deshpande and Abhay Deol), a representative middle-class couple who are introduced as they wave their son Ujjwal (Abhishek Sharrma) and daughter...