‘Santosh’ movie review: Sandhya Suri’s layered procedural dissects the casual cruelties of power-OxBig News Network

A still from ‘Santosh’
| Photo Credit: Vertigo Films

In Sandhya Suri’s Santosh, a young Dalit girl has been murdered and her body is found floating in a village well. But it’s the apathy, the procedural inertia, and the sneering shrugs and sideways glances that come after, that she somehow makes feel more criminal, more evil. The dead victim, as these things often go, is secondary. The focus instead lies on how the living respond, contorting themselves around the discomfort of injustice, and how the system metabolises tragedy. At the center of it all is the titular Santosh, a reluctant police constable who assumes her dead husband’s post not so much out of civic duty but as the only alternative to facing the scorn of her bitter in-laws.

A terrific Shahana Goswami plays Santosh with a weary tautness, like someone still getting used to the weight of her new uniform. She isn’t a crusader. She just wants a roof over her head, a paycheck, and a way to avoid being swallowed by the void of widowhood. But on her first day, she’s thrown headfirst into a case that’s already unsolvable for the simple reason that no one in power wants to solve it. The girl’s brutalised corpse lies on slabs of melting ice and the police remain disgustingly indifferent and unbothered. Santosh initially does what any reasonable person would do — she watches, listens, and learns the rules.

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.

A still from ‘Santosh’
| Photo Credit:
Vertigo Films

Suri’s direction is unflashy (which is a polite way of saying she doesn’t particularly care whether you’re entertained). She doesn’t seem interested in the momentary adrenaline rushes of your typical procedural thrillers, even though the film does feature some edge-of-your-seat tension. She builds suspense through the everyday compromises that don’t feel like compromises at all until one day you wake up and realise you’ve become someone else entirely. The cinematography leans into this, trapping its characters in static frames, boxed into the cramped police station, the crumbling village homes, and dingy, suffocating alleyways of semi-urban hamlets.

One of the film’s most impressive triumphs is its use of non-actors, who slip seamlessly into the screen and make you question where performance ends and reality begins. There’s no ostentation, no self-consciousness — just people inhabiting their own skin, moving through the film as though they’ve always been there. It’s this unvarnished authenticity that make the film’s truths feel far too ingrained to feel like revelations at all.

The great trick of Santosh is presenting power as something that never arrives as a grand temptation. It surreptitiously seeps in, offering small, justifiable trespasses as rules bent ever so slightly until the bending becomes habit. Santosh, like so many before her, starts off just trying to survive. But survival in the Indian police force (or any police force, for that matter) is hardly a neutral act. The uniform doesn’t grant authority; it demands complicity. And so without realising it, Santosh absorbs the caste hierarchies that dictate who is worth protecting and who is disposable, the communal politics that make certain suspects more “guilty” than others, and the institutionalised misogyny that ensures her power is only ever provisional — granted at the behest of men who can revoke it at will. The film never sermonises about these structures because it doesn’t need to. They’re simply there, as omnipresent and inescapable as the next dead body to turn up in the Dalit village’s well.

A still from ‘Santosh’
| Photo Credit:
Vertigo Films

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 moments where Santosh lays its cards on the table, instead of letting its commentary slip through in offhanded remarks and casual cruelties.

A minor gripe: Suri seems to flinch in the final stretch. After spending so much time luxuriating in the system’s grimy, cynical logic, she suddenly feels compelled to tidy things up, to give Santosh a lifeline back from the moral abyss. 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.

Of course, the greatest irony of Santosh is that while it has been celebrated internationally — becoming the UK’s official submission for the Oscars — it remains in censorship limbo at home. The fragile wisdom of Indian censors have demanded changes (probably heavy ones), and the filmmakers, to their credit, are refusing to budge. And so, the film sits in bureaucratic purgatory, an entirely fitting fate for a movie that understands, better than most, why justice is never a guarantee.

Santosh was screened at the Red Lorry Film Festival 2025