“There are two types of untouchables in this country,” observes a key character in Sandhya Suri’s India-set crime thriller Santosh. “Those who everybody wants to touch and those who nobody wants to touch.” This line neatly encapsulates the key theme running through British-Indian director Suri’s debut dramatic feature, in which a harrowing rape and murder case becomes a magnifying glass for deeper faultlines in Indian society: ingrained misogyny, police corruption, Islamophobia, class and caste tensions.
Making a career shift from documentary to fiction, Suri’s track record includes a spell at Sundance Labs initiative in 2016, where she was mentored by Robert Redford himself. Before that she worked at NGOs, with special focus on violence against women. Indeed, Santosh was partly inspired by the notorious “Nirbhaya” case from 2012, in which 22-year-old Jyoti Singh was raped and fatally assaulted by six men on a bus in southern Delhi, sparking major public protests, political scandal and changes to the Indian law system. These events have already been covered more directly on screen in multiple documentaries and docu-dramas, including Deepa Mehta’s Anatomy of Violence (2019) and the Netflix TV series Delhi Crime (2019).
Backed by a prestige international production team, including the BBC and MK2, Santosh is a polished, thoughtful, quietly furious piece of contemporary drama, taking aim at big targets including patriarchal power and social inequality. Headline-grabbing themes and generally positive buzz should give it healthy art-house appeal, but is is also overlong and heavy-handed in places, undermining its own noble motivations and suspenseful grip. World premiered in Cannes last month, it next screens in Karlovy Vary Film Festival, which opens this weekend.
Working mostly with subtle reaction shots and internalised emotions, Shahana Goswami gives a compelling central performance as Santosh Suri, a middle-class Hindu woman in a rural Indian town whose comfortable domestic life takes a precarious turn after her police officer husband is killed on duty. Shunned by her hostile in-laws, faced with mounting bills and possible eviction, she reluctantly accepts a “compassionate appointment”, a real Indian government scheme which allows police widows to take over the jobs of their late spouses.
Santosh’s bumpy training period as a fish out of water surrounded by clownish, boorish male colleagues initially has a comical dimension, with distant echoes of Goldie Hawn in Private Benjamin (1980). But she is soon thrown in at the deep end following the harrowing rape and murder of a low-caste Dalit girl, whose body has been callously dumped in a village well.
By convention in India, such sensitive cases are handled by female police officers. An infamous force of nature among her co-workers, veteran detective Geeta Sharma (Sunita Rajwar) steps in to take charge of the investigation. Despite her fearsome reputation, Geeta becomes a kind of mother-hen mentor to Santosh, helping her navigate the ingrained sexism and routine corruption that infects her macho police colleagues, who are rather too fond of Bollywood action thrillers and their vigilante cop heroes.
Geeta’s muscular brand of kick-ass feminism proves especially refreshing to Santosh given that her police superiors, local politicians and wealthy community elders show minimal interest in seeking real justice for the dead girl, whose outcast status means she has little value to them. “We are illiterate, is that why the police chief is deaf to us?” her father asks Santosh. He already knows the answer.
But as intense media scrutiny and political heat builds around this sensational case, with its knotty issues of class and race, sexual assault and inter-caste tension, pressure mounts on Geeta and Santosh to deliver some kind of speedy resolution. A prime suspect is soon identified, a young Muslim boy who had clandestine assignations with the victim, and now appears to be on the run.
In its final act, Santosh shifts focus from police procedural to low-voltage pursuit thriller. Despite her inexperience, the young heroine proves herself a brave and skilled detective, winning high praise for helping to bring this scandalous case to a neat conclusion. But in the process, she comes to see her own complicity in an institutionally rotten justice system, where conveniently lower-caste suspects are framed, beaten and even killed in custody while powerful, well-connected upper-class criminals go unpunished.
Though there are shock twists and reversals here, this finale is also the film’s weakest section, ponderously paced and schematic, with lurches into preachy melodrama. Santosh is well crafted and admirably well-intentioned, but it falls short of the righteous, impassioned protest drama it could have been.
Director, screenwriter: Sandhya Suri
Cast: Shahana Goswami, Sunita Rajwar, Sanjay Bishnoi, Kushal Dubey, Shashi Beniwal
Dialogue: Rohit K. Sharma
Camera: Lennert Hillege
Editing: Maxime Pozzi Garcia
Music: Luisa Gerstein
Producers: Mike Goodridge, James Bowsher, Balthazar De Ganay, Alan McAlex
Production companies: Good Chaos (UK), BFI (UK), BBC Film (UK) MK2 Films (France), Haut et Court (France), Lionfish Films (France), Razor Film (Germany)
Venue: Karlovy Vary Film Festival (Horizons)
In Hindi
125 minutes
