There are crime dramas that want to comfort you with the idea that justice, eventually, wins. And then there’s Santosh, which calmly takes that idea, walks it out back, and buries it in a shallow grave. Sandhya Suri’s feature debut uses the familiar shell of a police procedural to do something far more unsettling: pull apart how caste, patriarchy and state power work together in modern India and how little room they leave for actual human beings.
Santosh (Shahana Goswami) doesn’t join the police because she has a calling. She’s pushed into uniform by a policy that sounds benevolent on paper and predatory in practice: “compassionate appointment.” Her husband, a low-ranking constable, is killed; the state offers her his job. Take the badge or slide into poverty.
It’s less an opportunity than an arm-twisted oath of loyalty. The film never lets you forget that her “choice” is just another form of coercion.
Her first major case is the sort of crime that politicians love to stand in front of microphones for: a Dalit schoolgirl found murdered, her body dumped in a village well.
Public rhetoric arrives right on cue. “In a country where goddesses are worshipped, such a crime cannot go unpunished,” promises Santosh’s feminist boss. On the surface, it sounds noble. But the line lands like a warning shot: here comes the performance of outrage, carefully staged to protect the image of the nation rather than the lives of its most vulnerable citizens.
The mask slips almost immediately. On national television the misogynistic police chief warns, “Girls want to wear jeans, have a smartphone, go out alone. No wonder they get raped.” It’s a horrifying sentence, but not a surprising one. He clearly didn’t see the distraught father desperately try to keep the flies from his daughter’s body, or her hair spool out from under her death shroud.
Suri treats it not as some isolated monster’s rant, but as the distilled version of a worldview that runs through the police station, the family home and the state. Female autonomy is framed as provocation; modernity itself is the culprit. The real job of the investigation is not to find the truth, but to restore a moral order where women “know their place” and the powerful remain untouched.
Goswami plays Santosh as someone perpetually half a step behind the logic of the system she’s entered. She’s neither a naive saint nor a hardened cynic. She needs the job, she wants to do it well, and she very quickly realises that “doing it well” may mean going along with things that make her sick. Her superior, Inspector Sharma (Sunita Rajwar), is the future that awaits her: razor-sharp, battle-scarred, and all too fluent in the language of compromise. Sharma is mentor, shield and cautionary tale rolled into one.
Caste is not treated as background colour; it’s the operating system. The murdered girl’s Dalit identity shapes who is listened to, who is dismissed, who is considered inherently suspect. Suri shows this without big speeches. It’s in who gets to sit on chairs in a meeting, whose name makes it onto an official document, who is told to wait outside.
Every supposedly neutral procedure is already tilted. By the time you’ve watched a few statements rewritten and a few files quietly sidelined, the question “Who killed this girl?” has morphed into “Who does this system exist to serve?”
Religion and nationalism drift through the film like smog: temple loudspeakers, posters, pious soundbites about culture and purity. That earlier line about goddesses being worshipped keeps echoing. If women are sacred in the abstract but disposable, the problem isn’t individual wickedness; it’s a whole ideological framework that lets a country congratulate itself while Dalit girls are left at the bottom of wells.
Formally, Santosh stays stripped-down and observational. The camera lingers in cramped offices, dusty roads, airless homes, William Friedkin called it induced documentary style when he employed it in The French Connection. There are no heroic shots of the uniform, no swelling score to tell you when to feel righteous.
That aesthetic minimalism is a political choice. It insists that what you’re seeing isn’t exceptional or operatic; it’s everyday governance. When violence appears, it rarely feels like a shocking twist. It feels like paperwork being processed or evidence that has been compromised.
By the time the case reaches its official conclusion, the film has already told you not to expect a miracle.
Someone is blamed. A narrative is stitched together. The state can point to the file and say, look, justice was done.
But the structures that enabled the crime barely seem to flinch. Santosh is left more knowing and more compromised, standing in a uniform that now fits a little better and weighs a lot more.
Santosh is a bleak watch, and deliberately so. It refuses the fantasy that one good cop, or one determined woman, can fix a system built on hierarchies of caste, gender and power. Instead, it drags you into the uncomfortable recognition that these structures aren’t bugs; they’re features.
You don’t emerge uplifted. You emerge with the uneasy feeling that the well is still there, the files are still being shuffled and that the real horror is how ordinary it all looks.
Unsurprisingly Santosh is still unavailable to watch in India. Sandhya Suri has refused to make the cuts the censors want. For that, we should be grateful.