A policeman’s widow picks up her late husband’s badge in the noir-inflected thriller “Santosh” from British-Indian writer-director Sandhya Suri, whose background in documentary gives this moody character study slash crime procedural — and potent critique of institutional abuse in India — the air of something patiently witnessed as much as it is carefully crafted.
In the wake of her husband’s death in the line of duty, a stricken Santosh (Shahana Goswami) comes face to face with how precarious her situation is, as a childless woman in a sexist society without visible means of support (and dismissively mean in-laws to boot). Economic relief comes from the unlikeliest of sources: an Indian “compassionate appointment” law that can bestow a deceased government employee’s job to the surviving spouse. Santosh, with nowhere to go in her rural corner of India, quickly trades her traditional outerwear for a khaki cop uniform.
She’s a wide-eyed and cautious trainee, as one might expect in someone suddenly thrust from a domestic cocoon into potentially dangerous territory. She’s also relegated to “female” cases in which the appearance of a gender-balanced police force seems most important. Sometimes, a greased palm may be all that’s needed to handle wayward men, as when a girl’s complaint about a bad boyfriend facilitates, for the right price, her chance to get a few good smacks at him behind closed doors. But when an impoverished low-caste family’s missing 15-year-old daughter winds up dead, and the blundering, indifferent police, under pressure, bring in a veteran female inspector named Sharma (an outstanding Sunita Rajwar) to oversee the investigation, Santosh realizes she’s uniquely positioned to take part in some sisterhood-driven justice.
The charismatic Sharma takes Santosh under her wing, and while aspects of her attention feel ulterior, headway is made both in Santosh’s self-worth and in the case, which points to the involvement of a Muslim boy. And yet, in Suri’s scenario (drawn from the fallout of a 2012 Nirbhaya gang rape that brought to the forefront the country’s problem with violence against women), the other mystery to solve is a knotty, internal one: whether something in Santosh is disappearing, too. The allure of her newfound status and authority becomes a troublesome prism through which to view an unjust world.
What price female solidarity and empowerment, after all, if the weapon of actualization is an abusive system, one that invariably draws Santosh into its clubby, scornful, vigilante mindset? When the anger inside her is eventually given an outlet, in a scene that (perhaps a bit too neatly) bookends her first glimpse of police-sanctioned violence, “Santosh” becomes nothing less than a tragedy of identity. Aiding this descent is Lennert Hillege’s cinematography, coolly observant of confining darkness and stultifying daylight, not quite naturalism and not quite noir.
And yet as astutely clinical as Suri’s direction is, there’s a remove at which “Santosh” operates that keeps it from being a gut-punch classic. It charts its path and makes its compelling points — especially about police cliques — but sometimes at the cost of the human drama. To watch “Santosh” is to feel the undeniable power of a discerning, resonant case study. To fully know this character, however, is a goal just outside this otherwise intelligently wrought movie’s considerable reach.
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