Midway through Sandhya Suri’s Santosh, the camera tracks a police constable walking down the street. We can’t see who the person is, but we might assume that it’s Santosh Saini (Shahana Goswami), as she’s hardly seen out of her khaki uniform since joining the force at the start of the film. It’s only when we’ve followed the person all the way back to the police station and found Santosh already sitting there that we realize we’ve actually been tailing some other officer. And in this moment of confusion, as the camera shifts its gaze to Santosh, you might miss the suspect being tortured by a pair of officers on the other side of the room.
That series of scenes is a neat distillation of the themes that Santosh explores across its runtime. This is a film about how violence and corruption can become so commonplace that they barely even register, and how quickly a regular person like Santosh can become part of the engine of dehumanization. It’s also concerned with the sorts of systemic failures and social problems that are found all over the world, but its story is very specific to contemporary India.
The film begins as Santosh learns that her police constable husband has been killed in the line of duty. She makes a frantic phone call to her mother (Ram Kumari), regressing back into a terrified child desperate for someone to tell them that things are going to be okay. The anguished wail that ends the call is raw and moving and the last bit of unguarded emotion that Santosh will display. For the rest of Suri’s crime drama, Goswami’s performance is one of restraint, with Santosh’s fear and anger and pain all tamped back behind her eyes.
In addition to her mother, Santosh’s father (Jamil Warsi) and in-laws (Shiv Deen Singh and Mridula Bhardwaj) argue about who she should live with now. Neither couple wants to take on the burden of a thirtysomething widow, but she has to go live somewhere. While they bicker, Lennert Hillege’s camera stays fixed on Santosh as she kneels silently at their feet, off-screen voices deciding her destiny. It’s an effective way to convey her total disenfranchisement within a society that sees her less as a person and more as a problem to be solved.
A solution arises when Santosh discovers that she has the legal right to inherit her husband’s job. There’s something counterintuitive about a rule that seems so archaic serving such a progressive purpose, but the India on display in Santosh is shot through with such contradictions. Once on the force, Santosh finds that she’s able to enjoy equal status with at least some of her male colleagues, while her police powers let her stop civilian men on a whim, harassing and publicly humiliating anyone found guilty of the slightest infraction. The system that oppressed her now offers her agency and authority but only if she’ll help reinforce it.
It’s not just this fraught gender dynamic that Santosh explores, as it also outlines the multitude of other societal forces that complicate Santosh’s daily life. There are religious divides and caste differences that fracture communities. Remote villages are barely tied together by a dysfunctional bureaucracy, made all the more dysfunctional by the high rates of illiteracy. Altogether, it’s a system where vulnerable people have little hope of gaining access to anything remotely resembling justice, even with a “good cop” like Santosh on their side.
Things escalate when Inspector Geeta Sharma (Sunita Rajwar), a celebrity cop known for her work on cases involving violence against women, arrives to tackle the rape and murder of a young girl. Santosh is taken under her wing and falls under her spell, and it’s easy to see why, as Sharma is brash, unapologetic, and unafraid to take up space. And as Santosh pursues the case and tries to earn Sharma’s approval, she finds herself straying across moral boundaries. Suspects are lied to, then threatened, before, then, those threats are made good on. The longer the chase goes on, the more elusive truth seems to become—the less it seems to matter.
As a crime mystery, Santosh isn’t always compelling. The twists and reveals are seldom surprising, so we rarely feel like we’re discovering things along with Santosh. But maybe Suri’s film isn’t designed to surprise us. Perhaps it wants to show us how unsurprising this all is, how easily a vulnerable person like Santosh can be recruited into the machine that oppresses her, and how difficult it is to live morally as a person trapped between so many forces and fault lines, with so little power. As a depiction of these bleak realities, then, Santosh is extremely effective.
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