When the titular character’s husband dies in Sandhya Suri’s narrative-feature debut, she must take his job as a police constable to avoid homelessness. Her subsequent descent into complicity is shown one moral compromise at a time, carefully tracing Santosh’s psychology, weaving it with razor-sharp social commentary on class and gender in contemporary India. The result is not just a movie that’s interested in how individuals come to participate in harmful institutions, but is also a shatteringly human look at loss, class and rage.
The rage comes from Santosh’s husband being murdered in the line of duty while putting down an uprising in a local Muslim community. While this is never said directly through the dialogue, the emotion crystallizes onscreen through how she treats members of this lower-caste, condescending and sometimes even outright in her disdain. Suri takes her time building tension, letting us sit with Santosh as she scrubs her husband’s blood off his uniform, later donning it herself as she interrogates people over the murder of a young girl. When her superior asks how she can move through the world when her husband’s killer is still at large, Santosh doesn’t say ‘by finding this girl’s murderer, by giving someone else the justice I was never afforded,’ but it’s apparent in the next scene when she’s crossing certain moral boundaries in the name of the law. This slow pace and poetic approach to plot are crucial because they give viewers time to get very close to the protagonist, making us inhabit her perspective. I do think some scenes could have been trimmed a bit more tightly, and at times the pace takes away from the stakes and gravity of certain situations, but for the most part it’s a fantastic way of making us gradually understand why and how someone could grow so embittered. This is because Suri never opts for big monologues, but instead places a lot of trust in the visual language of the film.
The camerawork here is fantastic; Lennert Hillege’s handheld cinematography injects a lot of subjectivity into the frame, making chaotic scenes that much faster and slower scenes that much more intimate. There’s also a great use of color. In some sequences, Santosh practically blends in with her surroundings, getting lost in shadows or washed out thanks to her surroundings matching the beige of her police uniform. To me, this speaks to how overlooked and underappreciated Indian women are, a point that’s emphasized as she faces sexism in the workplace and in her daily life. Despite foregrounding this aspect of gender roles, there are moments where Santosh wears a bright blue sari that easily draws our eye to her, or when a column of light filters through the window and lands right on her, making it clear whose story is being told. If that isn’t enough to plant audiences in this character’s POV, then the heavy use of close-ups surely will. With each boundary that’s crossed while searching for the young girl’s murderer, we’re shown Santosh’s reaction to outright corruption, misogyny and systemic inequality. This approach requires the film to place a lot of trust in the actors’ hands.
Shahana Goswani does an excellent job playing Santosh. Her expert control over the minute shifts in her expressions almost makes dialogue superfluous; we understand how she feels, therefore how we should feel, just by watching her face. Toward the end of the film, when an earth-shattering revelation is made, we feel just as tricked as Santosh. Having spent the whole runtime so deeply connected to her character’s experience, the twist is equally surprising for us, and we end up realizing how easy it is for someone to be seduced by the system. Sunita Rajwar also did a great job as Inspector Sharma, whose corruption is played with such cool mundanity to highlight just how commonplace it is in this legal system.
I do think, as a procedural, this film could have been more revelatory by not giving us so many details at once; but I also wonder if approaching this as a procedural is worthwhile. It feels less interested in the mystery of who did it than the inefficient manner in which authorities chose to respond, showing how an innocuous woman ends up taking part in an innocent person’s death. It’s a film that exhibits how systems aren’t made of cardboard cutout monsters, but people just like us who, slowly, over time, lose sight of themselves. In this way, Santosh’s complicity is our own. I think this is what makes the ending feel so apocalyptic: the disillusioned protagonist trying to decide what’s next, as we all are in such fascistic, unstable times. Santosh hits theaters this weekend, and I hope you take some time to watch it!