Santosh
- 7.1
- Crime
- 2024
- 2h 8m
- PG-13
a hard-hitting Hindi-language crime drama and police procedural directed by Sandhya Suri, following the journey of a recent widow who takes her husband’s role as a police constable in rural northern India and becomes ensnared in the investigation of a Dalit girl’s brutal murder—an unflinching look at misogyny, systemic corruption, caste bias, and the struggle for justice.
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Santosh (2024), directed and written by Sandhya Suri, unfolds in the rugged rural badlands of northern India, where a young widow named Santosh—played with hushed intensity by Shahana Goswami—steps into her late husband's role as a police constable, not out of ambition but necessity. The government’s “compassionate appointment” law offers her housing, income, and bitter liberation from a home that blames her for her husband's death; but this bargain throws her into a male-dominated force run on misogyny, corruption, casteism, and religious prejudice, where survival depends as much on cunning as on competence.
When the body of a Dalit teenager is discovered in a well, Santosh is thrust into a labyrinthine investigation helmed by the formidable Inspector Sharma (Sunita Rajwar), whose tough, ambivalent mentorship reveals the system’s moral ambiguity. The case becomes a crucible through which Santosh confronts not only institutional biases but also the ways that power—granted and withheld—can distort justice. As she wades deeper into the mire, the film exposes how caste hierarchies and patriarchal violence undermine even the most earnest attempts at ethics in law enforcement.
Visually, Suri blends documentary discipline with cinematic tension—the natural glow of dusty villages, the cramped darkness of police stations, the quiet faces of villagers trudging through their daily struggle. A slow-burn thriller, it advances on quiet urgency, allowing scenes of violence, verbal hostility, and societal hypocrisy to linger and burn into the viewer’s conscience. Goswami’s performance may be almost wordless, but it’s charged with alertness and anguish, anchoring the film’s emotionally complex terrain. Rajwar’s inspector is both mentor and warning sign—someone who has navigated the system, broken through ceilings, yet remains part of its fractures.
Despite its glowing international acclaim—it premiered at Cannes, secured BAFTA and Academy Award attention, and earned critical plaudits for its analytic depiction of India's darkest social fault lines—Santosh has not been screened in India. The Central Board of Film Certification demanded extensive cuts, from caste representations to narrative restructuring, which the filmmaker, unwilling to compromise the film’s integrity, refused to accept. The film’s blocked domestic release underscores the paradox: a film deeply about Indian realities may ultimately be denied to Indian audiences, even as it wins their sympathy and accolades abroad.