‘Santosh’: Cannes Review

Dir/scr: Sandhya Suri. India/France/UK/Germany. 2024. 127mins

This gripping, sinewy police procedural set in northern India, follows Santosh (Shahana Goswami), a young widow who, thanks to a government scheme, is offered her late husband’s job as a police constable. It’s a role that brings her self-respect, independence, a sense of duty and crucially, a newfound power in the world. It also gives her a front-row seat from which she views the ugly realities of law enforcement in her corner of India: the rife corruption, the institutional sexism, the caste prejudices and the casual brutality. It’s a terrific feature debut from British-Indian documentary filmmaker Sandhya Suri – a propulsive neo-noir that holds up a mirror to contemporary India.

A propulsive neo-noir that holds up a mirror to contemporary India

Suri, a 2023 Screen Star Of Tomorrow, cut her teeth in documentaries with the 2006 title I For India, which premiered in Sundance, followed in 2018 by the BAFTA nominated short film The Field and the archive essay feature documentary Around India With A Movie Camera. Her switch to fiction from factual filmmaking is assured: this is a crisply-executed crime picture that negotiates its hot-button themes with intelligence and a refreshing lack of sensationalism. Further festival interest is likely following the film’s premiere in Un Certain Regard, where it could also generate a flurry of interest among buyers.

There’s a watchful quality in Goswami, a sense of a formidable intellect behind a quiet demeanour, that works supremely well in her performance as Santosh. This is a character who is constantly pulled by conflicting forces: she is negotiating grief over the loss of her beloved husband (“a love match” comments one character, knowingly), but at the same time she is offered an opportunity to realise her own considerable potential. She is, she quickly grasps, good at her job. She sees and abhors the worst behaviour of her colleagues, and yet she is not immune to the fringe benefits of the position – the authority imbued in her smart, sand-brown uniform, the fists full of rupee notes offered by miscreants hoping to bribe their way out of a tight spot. 

Of all her colleagues, most of them smirking men who get their kicks from punching down, Santosh is the only one who takes seriously the anguished low-caste man who comes to report the disappearance of his teenage daughter, Devika. Even so, her superiors send him packing without logging his complaint. But when Devika’s body is found a few days later, public anger swells and protests erupt against the police force’s indifference and mishandling of the case. To defuse the situation, the police authorities hand the case over to a woman: Inspector Sharma (Sunita Rajwar) is a trailblazing veteran female police officer who, after a rocky first encounter, takes a shine to Santosh.

There’s a knotty complexity to the relationship between the two women, something that Rajwar mines superbly with her charismatic but unreadable performance. On one hand, Sharma acts as a mentor, elevating the younger woman and fast-tracking her advancement. On the other, there’s an uneasy intimacy in her approach. It could just be clumsy overtures of friendship. After all, what could be lonelier than being a powerful woman in a male-dominated world? Or it could be something more predatory. 

Santosh learns much from the experience, but her takeaway is something that places her at odds with all of her colleagues: the idea that police work doesn’t necessarily stop one a conviction has been bludgeoned home. And true justice is hard to come by in a place where guilt is assumed if you’re poor, and innocence can be bought if you’re rich.