Santosh (2024) Review: Power Borrowed With a Uniform

Is Santosh worth watching?

Yes. Santosh is a quietly gripping police drama that turns one woman’s new job into a clear-eyed study of how power, caste and gender work in rural India. Sandhya Suri’s first fiction feature is precise and unsentimental, and Shahana Goswami’s lead performance holds every scene together. The reservation is that the film is more interested in its heroine’s moral education than in the mechanics of a crime story, so viewers expecting a conventional thriller may find it slow and deliberately unresolved in places.

What is Santosh about?

In Santosh, a young woman is suddenly widowed when her husband, a police constable, is killed. Under a government scheme that lets a family member take over the job, Santosh (Shahana Goswami) inherits his uniform and his post in a small town in the rural badlands of northern India. She has no background in policing and little welcome from the men around her.

Her real training begins when a low-caste teenage girl is found murdered and Santosh is drawn into the investigation alongside a senior officer, Inspector Sharma (Sunita Rajwar), a forceful woman who takes her under her wing. What she learns about the case is less important than what she learns about the force.

Suri, a British-Indian filmmaker best known before this for documentary work, wrote and directed the film. It is set and shot in India, in Hindi, runs 128 minutes and premiered at Cannes in 2024.

Shahana Goswami’s watchful, unshowy lead

Goswami gives one of the most controlled performances in recent Indian cinema. Santosh is not a crusader; she is a grieving, practical woman who takes the job because it is the job on offer, and Goswami lets the character’s awareness change almost invisibly. Early on she stands at the edge of rooms. Later she learns what the uniform lets her get away with, and the film’s most unsettling moments come from watching her discover that she likes it.

Sunita Rajwar is equally strong as Sharma, a warm, funny and formidable mentor whose methods become harder to defend the more closely the film looks at them. The relationship between the two women is the core of the film, and it resists easy labels: it is protective, instructive and compromising all at once. Both actors were rewarded for good reason, and Goswami’s Best Actress win at the Asian Film Awards is easy to understand.

A procedural that looks at the system, not the culprit

Suri’s documentary background shows in the texture. The police station, the villages and the domestic spaces feel observed rather than staged, and the camera is patient enough to let bureaucracy, casual insults and small humiliations accumulate. Caste is not delivered as a lecture; it is present in who is questioned, who is believed and who is expected to wait outside.

That is also why the film works as a thriller despite its restraint. The tension comes less from clues than from dread about what the institution will do to protect itself, and whether Santosh will go along with it. Violence is mostly off screen, yet the film’s handling of custody and interrogation is more disturbing than most gunfights.

Where the restraint costs it

The same discipline occasionally works against the story. The investigation itself is sketched rather than developed, and some supporting characters, including the victim’s family, remain more symbolic than individual. A late stretch that pulls Santosh’s private life back into focus lands with less force than the scenes inside the station. Viewers who want a mystery solved cleanly will be frustrated; the film is more concerned with complicity than closure.

Who should watch Santosh?

It is for viewers who value serious social cinema and character-driven crime drama, and for anyone curious about Hindi-language independent film beyond the commercial mainstream. At 128 minutes it takes its time, but it asks for attention. It deals with sexual violence against a minor, police brutality and caste discrimination; little is shown explicitly, but the themes are heavy and not suited to younger viewers.

It sits apart from most of India’s popular thrillers, but two comparisons are useful:

• Drishyam, another Hindi small-town crime story in which the police and a family collide, told as a far more commercial suspense piece.
• Andhadhun, a sharper, darkly comic thriller that shares Santosh’s interest in characters sliding into moral compromise.

The verdict

Santosh is a tough, intelligent debut that uses a police procedural to show how an institution absorbs the people who join it. Its restraint leaves the investigation thinner than it could be, but Goswami and Rajwar make the film’s central question impossible to shake off.

Rating: 4/5