SANTOSH - Mark Reviews Movies

Santosh, Metrograph Pictures

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Review by Mark Dujsik | December 26, 2024

Corruption is everywhere humanity exists, and Santosh finds it in the local police forces of India, where the location is secondary to human beings' ability to bring their flaws into systems intended for the public good. Writer/director Sandhya Suri's film feels as familiar as fictional and real-life stories of police malpractice in the United States or Suri's native England, but there is a specificity of Indian society and culture backing up this reminder of the universality of corruption.

The setup almost comes across as a narrative gimmick but is actually based on actual policy in the country. It focuses on Santosh Saini (Shahana Goswami), a young widow whose husband, a police officer in the city, was killed during a protest that became a riot. Disowned by her local in-laws and with a widow's pension that won't cover the needs of basic living, Santosh is given a seemingly odd proposition. A government scheme allows a police widow to take over her late husband's job—after proper training and assignment to a precinct in need of new constables, of course.

Since she has nothing to lose (Her apartment was owned by the local government, for example, leaving her without a home in the city), Santosh agrees to the plan and is transplanted to a smaller municipality near the countryside. Her job as a woman constable is mainly to serve as backup and to deal with specific issues, such as men who falsely seduce women under the pretense of possible marriage and keeping an eye out for potential sexual predators.

Almost as soon as she begins her work, Santosh takes a bribe from a young man, whom she finds touching a woman in a secluded area, to keep the incident off the record and witnesses some other cops beating another man accused of wooing a young woman with no intention of marrying her. She takes the cash with a smile, because her situation is tough, and turns her eyes from the police violence, because there's not much she could say or do to stop it.

The plot of Suri's narrative feature debut revolves around a murder mystery. In a nearby village for the Dalit—the country's so-called "untouchables"—caste, a teenage girl's body is found in the local well. She was raped and murdered, and the crime quickly becomes a scandal for the police department. Santosh had met the girl's father shortly before her body was discovered, trying to file an official report of his daughter's disappearance.

The police have little interest in the Dalits, their concerns, and the crimes committed against them (One of the most discouraging details here is how a local cobbler doubles as an in-between agent for the Dalit caste and the cops). Santosh's now-former boss ignored and even mocked the father, and the public attention of the girl's murder brings a new commander to the precinct to take over the investigation.

She's Geeta Sharma (Sunita Rajwar), an intriguing study of duality. Geeta is a figure worthy of some admiration, rising through the ranks in a male-dominated culture and career, and one also worthy of plenty of suspicion. Santosh looks up to her new superior officer immediately, but a fellow woman constable notes how Geeta shows her true colors by hanging out with the men at the station, laughing with them, and secretly determining which of the local cops will become her underling.

In public, Geeta talks tough about reforming the police, especially in bringing more women into the fold, and working for justice. As Santosh becomes the commander's right hand in the investigation, though, that outer display of righteous speeches crumbles as we get a look at how Geeta operates and expects the officers under her to follow along without asking too many—or any—questions.

The narrative itself features something of a dual nature, as well. On the surface, it's a clever mystery, following Santosh and Geeta as they assemble a likely motive for the murder, find a suspect by way of the girl's cellphone messages, establish a timeline for how he might have done the crime and worked out a phony alibi, and use technology to trace the suspect, who happens to be Muslim but whose religion makes the prejudiced Geeta even more certain of his guilt.

The skeleton of the plotting is undeniably the stuff of the usual mystery tale. In establishing the social hierarchy of the caste system and the politics of the police's relationships with these different communities, though, Suri finds a source of outrage that extends further than the crime and the cops' initial dismissal of the case.

As Santosh and Geeta get closer to their suspect and start to find possible holes in their assumptions, that sense of indignation goes deeper. The story becomes about more than its mystery, getting at how rampant corruption can be in these systems, how easy it is to become complicit in it (Santosh has doubts about the man's guilt, but she cannot or, perhaps, will not defy Geeta, whom she does admire despite obvious flaws and who holds sway over what happens to her career), and how violence is the inevitable conclusion of unchecked power.

The truth here eventually comes to light, but at a certain point, it's almost irrelevant to the ultimate consequences of the investigation. That's not because it's unimportant as a matter of the truth and justice, but because it doesn't matter to certain characters in this story—the ones who decide who's guilty and who is allowed to go free (Geeta offers an unsettling notion of the double meaning of "untouchable"). Santosh is a smart thriller with an increasingly weary conscience.

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