‘Santosh’ review: Indian drama about police corruption is gripping

A police officer’s widow retrieves her late husband’s badge in the Anglo-Indian writer-director’s noir thriller “Santosh” Sandhya Suriwhose background in documentary makes this brooding character study of criminal procedure – and a powerful critique of institutional abuses in India – the air of something patiently observed as much as carefully crafted.

Following the death of her husband in the line of duty, a stricken Santosh (Shahana Goswami) finds herself confronted with the precariousness of her situation, as a childless woman in a sexist society, without means of subsistence. visible (and disdainfully, wickedly illegal to boot). Economic help comes from the unlikeliest of sources: an Indian “compassionate appointment” law that can confer the position of a deceased government employee on the surviving spouse. Santosh, who has nowhere to go in his rural corner of India, quickly swaps his traditional outerwear for a khaki cop uniform.

She’s a wide-eyed and cautious intern, as you might expect from someone suddenly thrust from a domestic cocoon into potentially dangerous territory. It is also relegated to “female” cases in which the appearance of an equal police force seems most important. Sometimes a greased palm can be enough to handle temperamental men, like when a girl’s complaint about a bad boyfriend eases, for the right price, her chance to give him a few good smacks behind closed doors. But when the missing 15-year-old daughter of a poor, low-caste family ends up dead and the clumsy and indifferent police, under pressure, call in a seasoned detective named Sharma (a remarkable Sunita Rajwar) to supervise the investigation , Santosh realizes. she is in a unique position to participate in sisterhood-led justice.

The charismatic Sharma takes Santosh under her wing, and although some aspects of her attention seem unacknowledged, progress is made both in Santosh’s self-esteem and in the case, which indicates the involvement of a boy Muslim. And yet, in Suri’s storyline (taken from the fallout from a Gang rape in Nirbhaya in 2012 which brought the issue of violence against women to the forefront), the other mystery to be solved is a thorny internal one: is something disappearing in Santosh too. The allure of his new status and authority becomes an awkward prism through which to view an unjust world.

After all, what is the price of women’s solidarity and empowerment if the weapon of their actualization is an abusive system, which invariably drags Santosh into his clubby, contemptuous, vigilante mindset? When the anger within her finally comes out, in a scene that (perhaps a little too neatly) concludes her first glimpse of police-sanctioned violence, “Santosh” becomes nothing less than a tragedy of identity. This descent is aided by Lennert Hillege’s cinematography, coolly observant of confining darkness and stupefying daylight, not quite naturalistic and not quite noir.

And yet, as artfully clinical as Suri’s direction is, there is a withdrawal that “Santosh” operates at that prevents it from being a jaw-dropping classic. He traces his path and puts forward his convincing arguments – particularly about police cliques – but sometimes at the cost of human drama. To watch “Santosh” is to feel the undeniable power of an insightful and resonant case study. However, fully knowing this character is a goal that lies just outside the considerable scope of this otherwise intelligently crafted film.