A little Dalit girl is murdered in Sandhya Suri’s Santosh, and her body is discovered floating in a village well. However, she somehow makes the indifference, the procedural immobility, the scornful shrugs, and the sidelong glances that follow seem more terrible and criminal. As is typically the case, the deceased victim is secondary. Instead, the emphasis is on how the system metabolizes tragedy and how the living react, bending around the unease of injustice. The main character is Santosh, a hesitant police constable who takes over her deceased husband’s position more as a means of avoiding her resentful in-laws’ disdain rather than out of civic obligation.
Santosh is portrayed by a fantastic Shahana Goswami with a tired, tautness that suggests she is still adjusting to the pressure of her new outfit. She is not an activist. All she needs is a place to live, a salary, and a means of escaping the abyss of widowhood. However, on her first day, she is thrust into a situation that is already unsolvable because the people in charge don’t want to solve it. The police are disgustingly unconcerned and unconcerned, while the girl’s brutalized body rests on slabs of melting ice. At first, Santosh observes, listens, and learns the rules—just like any other sensible person would.
The revoltingly misogynistic police commissioner whose primary qualification for the job seems to be an unshakable belief in victim-blaming, is swiftly replaced by Inspector Geeta Sharma. Played by a tremendous Sunita Rajwar, Sharma carries an almost subliminal menace that makes you sit up a little straighter, the way you do when a teacher with a reputation walks into the room. She’s a pragmatist in the way only long-weathered bureaucrats can be. Justice isn’t the goal but another smokescreen, a cog in the machine, and her job is to keep the damn thing running. Meanwhile, the greenhorn Santosh is treated like raw material, waiting to be shaped. Under Sharma’s watchful (and ever-so-salacious) eye, Santosh learns to savour the small, everyday pleasures of power. Goswami plays this slow corruption masterfully; her face is a study in barely perceptible shifts, flickers of hesitation giving way to steely resolve, the contours of her disillusionment settling in like a permanent shadow.
Unflashy is Suri’s direction, which is a kind way of stating that she doesn’t really care if you’re entertained. Although there is some suspenseful tension in the movie, she doesn’t seem to be interested in the fleeting thrills of procedural thrillers. Through routine sacrifices that don’t feel like compromises until you wake up one day and realize you’ve completely changed, she creates tension. The protagonists are confined to the little police station, the dilapidated village houses, and the dark, stuffy alleyways of semi-urban hamlets, and the photography plays into this by keeping them in still images.
The film’s use of non-actors, who blend in well and make you wonder where acting ends and reality begins, is one of its most striking achievements. People are simply living in their own flesh and going through the movie as if they’ve always been there, without any ostentation or self-consciousness. The film’s facts seem far too embedded to be revelations because of its unadulterated honesty.
Santosh’s big technique is to portray power as a magnificent temptation that never materializes. It sneaks in by offering minor, acceptable transgressions as regulations are gradually loosened until the bending turns into a habit. Like many others before her, Santosh begins by only attempting to survive. However, it is far from neutral to survive in the Indian police force—or any police force, for that matter. The uniform calls for cooperation rather than authority. Without realizing it, Santosh thus takes in the caste system that determines who should be protected and who should be let go, the communal politics that make some suspects more “guilty” than others, and the institutionalized misogyny that guarantees her power is always only temporary—granted at the whim of men who have the authority to take it away at any time. Because it doesn’t have to, the movie never preaches about these frameworks. As ubiquitous and unavoidable as the next corpse discovered in the Dalit village’s well, they are just there.
Rajwar lays out the film’s thesis in one scathing, insidious line — “There are two kinds of untouchables in this country: those no one wants to touch, and those who can’t be touched”. It’s one of the few times when Santosh shows its cards rather than allowing its opinion to be revealed through simple insults and trite comments.
A small complaint: Suri appears to wince in the last moments. She feels driven to clean things up and provide Santosh with a lifeline to save him from the moral abyss after spending so much time basking in the dirty, cynical logic of the system. It’s a small betrayal that doesn’t ruin the final act so much as it reveals a faint hesitation in the film’s otherwise ruthless dissection of power.
The biggest irony of Santosh, of course, is that, despite its international acclaim and its status as the UK’s official Oscar submission, it is still in censorship limbo at home. To their credit, the filmmakers are refusing to yield in response to the brittle wisdom of Indian censors, who have demanded changes—likely significant ones. As a result, the movie is stuck in bureaucratic purgatory, which is a perfectly appropriate fate for a film that knows better than most why justice is never guaranteed. Santosh was screened at the Red Lorry Film Festival 2025.
