santosh

Methodical and patient, Sandhya Suri's Santosh is an involving, India-set crime story. After the death of her police officer husband, Santosh (Shahana Goswami) becomes a constable as part of a sort of job inheritance. By her own initiative, she takes on a case in a rural area where a young girl was brutally murdered. This kind of procedural of a woman on her own investigating a crime seems familiar at first, especially to those who routinely watch film and television mysteries, yet the details, setting and Suri's slippery, slightly askew observations make it a wholly unique story.    

Much of the film relays small and large tensions of class, gender, and corruption within the caste system. There's also an element of unpredictability—the ways in which people behave and react are sly and consistently surprising. As a viewer, I was recognizing certain familiar crime drama tropes, but felt as if I was always on my toes throughout. The film is more of a rumination and meditation than a whodunit. 

When Santosh meets the more experienced, more jaded and worn local officer Sharma (Sunita Rajwar, in a wonderful, layered performance), their relationship and the movie's plot take on an intriguing complexity. The film seemed to hover dangerously close to an outmoded patristic lesbian-coded matriarch dynamic, but Suri is a keen writer and filmmaker who subverts expectations without being gimmicky. 

The film is beautifully photographed by Lennert Hillege (who shot Steve McQueen's Occupied City, which surely had to have been a towering undertaking). The photography reaps the lush colors of its locales at odds with the police force's plain, bland khaki uniforms and the murky opaqueness of the story (the film's brilliant final shots almost have the feel of images in disintegration, considering what they are blocked by). Santosh is a quiet, plain protagonist who changes in subtle and more shocking ways, and is the perfect guide of this carefully-crafted, unraveling tale. Suri, whose background is in documentaries, shows tremendous promise with this first narrative feature. ***

-Jeffery Berg