Usually, I can sniff the faintest odor of misogyny from a mile away, but sometimes, getting smashed in the face with outwardly heavy sexism can really reset the senses. Santosh, the narrative debut from British-Indian director Sandhya Suri, is that morning refresher (or baseball bat). Filial piety and the caste system supplies how our titular character (played by Shahana Goswami) is treated. From our side of Freedom™, it invokes a kind of whiplash of our American sensibilities, where we can detect punishment for existing as a woman in between insidious operations and outright beratement.
When her constable husband Raman is killed in the line of duty, Santosh is offered to take over his job (specifically phrased as a “lady police officer”) in order to keep the municipal-issued apartment and earn a wage on top of his pension. ACAB always, but the job offers a respite from the usual daggers of judgment from her in-laws and authorities, which Santosh receives in quiet complacency. It seems like a good deal on paper, but as the offering officer laments that Raman being one of the few “good ones,” we can predict that Santosh is going to be hurled into a new world of hurt and abuse.
So yes, Goswami’s performance as Santosh is eating as much proverbial shit from many people from many sides. Being a woman, police officer, and the newly adorned female representative of a corrupt police department feels like a social lose-lose-lose situation. Santosh’s uniformed superiors subject her to menial tasks, passerby will spit at her feet, and there is little reason to believe that Santosh would be a go-getter for justice in the first place. The role in itself has very little appeal, but Goswami locks herself in Santosh’s position and readies herself for the lady-officer job, which we see is dealing with domestic disputes and harassment. But things come to a deafening screech when the body of a young girl, Devita, is found in a water well.
The film’s energy is turned up to 11 when Inspector Sharma (Sunita Rajwar) comes onto the screen. After the town’s police chief is forcibly transferred to another city for publicly shaming Devita, Sharma steps in to lead the investigation. From the moment she speaks, we understand that she is the veteran HBIC. While she eases in quickly to the men-chat, she takes the time to guide Santosh with practicality and feminine instinct as they work together to find Devita’s killer. In this relationship, Sharma’s presence has a glowing effect on Santosh, who slowly believes that there could be some goddamn justice in this world after all.
The themes that seem familiar in Santosh are uprooted by how much we don’t know. When the original police chief was condemned over news channels for slutshaming, it set a distinction of Santosh’s rural setting from the country’s heterogeneity. Many of the residents describe themselves as wage laborers, as if the class of occupation speaks more than what they do for work. A cobbler is identified by both citizens and police as someone who can officially write crime reports, though it’s not clear if it’s because he may be one of the few with literacy skills or because he is a former officer with the need to do good. The wealth and customs displayed aren’t so outrageous that they’re impossible, but what we don’t know becomes a path for the unpredictable.
Santosh navigating the space in a new role among a community that she already knows is an interesting switch of face, but unfortunately, there is not much of a judicial or emotional payoff in this procedural. While I won’t go so far as to call it nihilistic, Santosh belongs in the “just-is” category, which feels worse than the concept that nothing is worth it. The Santosh that comes into this job doesn’t feel like a new Santosh by the end of the movie, except that she’s seen a lot of bad shit and may also do some bad shift. But didn’t she know that shit happens? Who was she beforehand? She didn’t have dreams of cleaning up the streets or a vision of how the world should be rearranged.
The film focuses on how much weathering her moral compass endures by the end, and through that, Sharma presents as her character’s challenge. Santosh exchanges an unspoken but knowing feeling with other female coworkers when the system works to their benefit, and she gets that tenfold when Sharma affirms her value as an officer. But the means for justice are squandered by Geeta’s goal for the end result, and questioning those means seem to be enough for Suri.
The film succeeds in Santosh’s unique perspective in this position, as well as some very inspiring shots (one of the best lighting uses goes to the interrogation room scene). The core of a good movie is in here, but Santosh feeling like she’s being passed through makes it feel like we are watching a ghost of someone, with only a small glimpse of life revealed at the end to make it feel like we missed out on a lot.
Santosh
2024
dir. Sandhya Suri
120 min.
