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‘Santosh’ Review: A Dramatic Inquiry Into Images of Indian Policing
Premiering in Un Certain Regard at Cannes, Sandhya Suri's feature debut 'Santosh' is a whip-smart if seldom enrapturing critique of power.
“Santosh” may be an independent Hindi production set in a small town, but it feels distinctly in conversation with its bombastic Bollywood cousins, which have recently taken a concerning bent in the way they revere India’s Hindu nationalist status quo and the abuse of police and political power. Watching Santosh learn the ropes of her local police station is amusing at first, but Goswami sells its increasing complications through silent reaction shots as her character becomes slowly absorbed by this power structure, its in-group language, its secrets and its casual corruption. But in the process, it finds value as an academic inquiry into familiar moving images by forcing the audience to lean forward and inspect their meaning and infer for themselves the most unsavory implications of the caste structures and Islamophobic norms so often taken for granted in the mainstream Indian milieu.
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