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A few years ago, there was an uproar over a scene of sustained violence in director Kathryn Bigelow’s Detroit, a period crime drama about a real-life incident that led to the deaths of three young men. The controversial scene unfolded across several uncomfortable minutes, and showed a group of white police officers beat down a lineup of innocent Black men. Bigelow didn’t avert her eyes from the horror, and instead, caught the audience by the scruff of the neck and made them watch. The film’s examination of ingrained racism, police brutality, and the systemic oppression of minorities drew parallels to modern-day America, but it also divided audiences. Director Sandhya Suri’s Santosh, which was screened at the recent Dharamshala International Film Festival, unpacks similar themes, but in the context of contemporary north India. Like Detroit, it pivots on a scene of unrelenting brutality that transforms it from a standard police procedural into something more haunting.
Shahana Goswami stars as the titular character, who is introduced to us as something of an outcast. Santosh is a recent widow, whose policeman husband was slain in a riot. Thanks to a government scheme, she finds herself in the unexpected position of having inherited his job. As someone who grew up in the patriarchal environs of the Hindu belt, she has no idea what to do, but is almost immediately partnered with a seasoned officer named Geeta. Played by Sunita Rajwar in a performance that switches from mentor-like to menacing in a matter of minutes, Geeta is a fascinating person. She’s clearly someone who has risen up the ranks by resigning herself to the system, and she expects the same of Santosh, who is instructed to partner up with her on a murder case.
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In some ways, Santosh is like a sleeker (and bleaker) version of director Hansal Mehta‘s The Buckingham Murders. Kareena Kapoor Khan’s detective character in that film is a more privileged person than Santosh, but only on paper. As played by the endlessly expressive Goswami, Santosh comes across as a decidedly more complex character; motivated by vague sense of duty and a simmering desire for justice. Our own ingrained sexism leads us, at least initially, to assume that she’s a non-entity; someone who is floating through life with no agency of her own. Even when she begins to show signs of authority, like the scene in which she interrogates a man in the middle of a gully cricket match, you’ll likely dismiss it as an uncharacteristic act of aggression.
The movie expects you to latch onto her emotionally, and when Santosh begins to take the bull by the horns and makes breakthroughs in the murder investigation, her resourcefulness shines through. Set in the fictional state of Chirag Pradesh — for a mostly European production, it’s surprising that the filmmakers have allowed themselves to be silenced by Indian censors — the movie attempts to expose the bigotry that nudges Geeta and her team to zero in on a Muslim man as the prime suspect. They discover that the young woman whose murder they’re investigating had exchanged messages with him before going off the grid, and this, seemingly, is all the evidence they need to pin it on him.
Once again, our own biases lead us to believe that Santosh is innocent in all this, surrounded as she is by hardened men and a clearly corrupt superior. But things take a violent turn when the cops nab their man, and attempt to extract a confession out of him in exactly the manner that you’d expect. Santosh is horrified, initially. As our surrogate in this hellscape — Suri presents north India like the apocalyptic wasteland that it can often be, and the police force as a kind of a cult — her experiences are designed to mimic our own. But the terrifying scene triggers a transformation. There is no need to reveal what happens next, but suffice to say that Santosh essentially sheds the passivity that her name implies. This ‘twist’, for the lack of a better word, adds an all-important layer of complexity to the movie, which had been threatening to incarcerate itself inside the confines of conventionality only moments ago.
Santosh is a grim experience that offers exactly one moment of levity. It’s a memorable one, sure to extract the sort of whoops that one might expect in a screening of Rohit Shetty’s Singham Again. But unlike the Cop Universe, which often excuses and celebrates police brutality, Suri’s film tries to understand it. Santosh allows you to believe that it is an empowerment tale, but this is merely a facade that it has adopted. Much like the figures of authority that surround us, projecting virtue and sincerity. In stark contrast to the majority of male-driven mainstream films about cops, Santosh isn’t in awe of its protagonist. It is, first and foremost, a character study about a grieving woman trapped in institutions designed to suffocate her and everybody else. But it is also a cracking crime film, determined to explore the communal divides that have crippled our country.
Santosh
Director – Sandhya Suri
Cast – Shahana Goswami, Sunita Rajwar
Rating – 4/5
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