‘Santosh’ Movie Review: Shahana Goswami Anchors a Clear-eyed, Moving Indictment of New India

Director: Sandhya Suri
Writer: Sandhya Suri
Cast: Shahana Goswami, Sunita Rajwar

Santosh is two movies. The first is rooted in how Santosh, meaning “contentment” or “happiness”, is traditionally a man’s name. This underdog movie is about Santosh Saini (Shahana Goswami), a 28-year-old widow who inherits her late husband’s police job. As a new woman constable, Santosh strives to make a name in the notoriously masculine field of law enforcement. She finds a mentor in Geeta Sharma (Sunita Rajwar), a veteran cop who has over the years become a symbol of feminism and gender empowerment. Together, they investigate the brutal rape and murder of a 15-year-old girl. Santosh impresses her superiors, transcends her “compassionate appointment” (or bereavement quota) image, reclaims her own identity, and chases the case.

This is the film that a specific India believes in: an inspiring coming-of-age story, a narrative of human fortitude, a gritty tale of patriarchy smashing and female agency. Santosh herself believes in it. It’s her against the world. But this is also the film that’s sold to this India. One that’s bereft of complexity, truth, ambiguity and labels. Ignorance, as they say, is bliss — or contentment.

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The second movie is the story hidden beneath the hashtags, simple arcs and feel-goodness. It’s a hostile movie that the same India deflects, and one that constable Santosh Saini eventually finds herself in. This Santosh is rooted in how a widow is so desperate to rise above an oppressive setting that she subconsciously becomes the oppressor. Confronting the world as a non-sheltered woman for the first time, she buys what’s sold to her. She trusts the brand.

A still from 'Santosh'

Here’s how the same story reads with context: Santosh lives in the fictional state of Chirag Pradesh (a spiritual sibling of Laapataa Ladies’ Nirmal Pradesh), a badland simmering with communal violence, caste discrimination, police negligence and Islamophobia. The city is ‘Mehrat,’ no resemblance to Meerut of course. The 15-year-old victim was a Dalit girl. A bigoted, male-centric police department refuses to pay heed until the media frenzy begins. The politicians want a quickfix. The optics need to improve.

Enter Geeta Sharma, a specialist at ‘solving’ high-pressure cases. Fuelled by Geeta and her towering influence, Santosh’s confirmation bias becomes its own character. She narrows in on a suspect named Saleem, a Muslim boy whose texts to the girl become the only proof needed. The investigation reaches the town where Santosh’s late husband, Raman, was killed in the riots. Geeta wants to make an example of the suspect. Santosh agrees — until she slowly discovers that she, too, is a patient of a diseased time. Her career in law enforcement is exposed as a career in ideal enforcement. To paraphrase the line of the film, Santosh is torn between two kinds of untouchables: those who people don’t want to touch and those who cannot be touched.

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Writer-director Sandhya Suri does a fine job of crafting an atmosphere ripe with societal complicity and social conditioning. This hierarchy of oppression is the Indian version of an anti-capitalist Korean series like Squid Game or a screwball American tragedy like Anora. In Santosh, the men wield power at the top by pitting all minorities — caste, class, religion, gender — against one another. An upper-caste and corrupt Geeta Sharma is happy — content — to be the link in this chain of abuse. In turn, Santosh is made to feel like she needs to belong; she has to prove herself. Her spunk is weaponized by a system that preys on blind valour and gendered ambition. When she follows orders without questioning them, she is rewarded with an aspirational ‘Western’ dessert like banoffee pie. For them, she is the perfect distraction story. The logic is familiar: when in doubt, bat for women empowerment. All people might notice is a brave widow punishing men and climbing a tall ladder; nobody cares about where the ladder leads.

A still from 'Santosh'

One of the film’s best scenes happens in a car. The senior Geeta is flaunting her surrogate masculinity — smoking, driving, dispensing wisdom, listening to an old Bollywood song — and connecting the performative element of cinema to life. She speaks of how everyone pretends and performs: the Muslims she interrogates “play the victim” while she makes up lies to intimidate them. Santosh listens, wide-eyed and nodding along, under the spell of a superwoman she admires. It’s hard not to see this scene as a metaphor for the relationship between new-age commercial cinema and its mass consumers. One sells hatred disguised as activism and cultural preservation, while the other listens and believes.

It says something that Sunita Rajwar — a talented actor relegated to the margins of popular Hindi entertainment as the “noisy neighbour” — plays the role of that fiction here. Except, her Geeta is not a woman telling women’s stories; she’s untelling them. She informs how the formidable Shahana Goswami plays the naive viewer who buys into the fiction, too. It’s almost as if Santosh has performed for so long, as a wife and a daughter and daughter-in-law, that she’s merely content to watch now. Santosh, for the most part, observes the not-so-subtle social biases around her. It may look like she’s judging them. She seems alarmed by the casual cruelty of it all: like when the cops carry out a ‘purification ritual’ at the station after the corpse leaves, or when she expects Geeta to react on being informed that nobody was agreeing to transport the body. Initially, it appears like Santosh has the ‘protagonist syndrome’ — where a person is automatically progressive and different by virtue of being the central character. Her former in-laws dismiss her as a rebel and a curse, implying that she probably marched to her own beat despite donning a veil of subservience.

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But it soon emerges that Santosh’s conscience is secondary to her own embattled identity. She isn’t judging; she’s learning and following. She allows herself to get brainwashed to survive. Early on, she accompanies a senior constable on her beat and enjoys the power she holds over the sheepish men from the couples they round up. For Santosh, at that point, the male gaze has no religion or name; misogyny is the crime, not the criminal. I like that the film is then sprinkled with little triggers of her ‘conversion’. At least two superiors assume her husband was killed by a Muslim rioter, planting the seed in her head. At one point, at the back of a police van, Geeta leans in — momentarily teasing our notion of the “man-hating lesbian” cliche — only to put a nose-stud on Santosh, as if to remind her of her role (and place) as a feminine warrior.

A still from 'Santosh'

This transformation is invisible to the naked eye. When Santosh stakes out a Muslim-dominated area and stops for lunch, she notices a man staring at her. Goswami’s body language is so loaded that, by now, you can tell that Santosh associates his lecherous gaze with his social identity. When she thrashes a suspect later, her actions feel like an accumulation of pent-up rage and public pressure. She just needs to blame someone — a community, a people, a place — for the loss of her husband, for the premature death of her love marriage. Being a homemaker, she was never afforded the privilege of grieving. A whiff of his shirt and a silent night was all she got; she washed off the blood stains from his uniform, shed a tear and slipped off her ring. The dignity of remembrance was not for her.

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It’s a testament to Goswami’s performance that Santosh lets this grief wear the expensive robes of prejudice. It gives her a false sense of direction and agency. It is, after all, the easiest thing: leave a wound open long enough and it festers. There’s a striking shot towards the end of the film. Santosh waits at a railway station — her view of a young couple on the opposite platform is hindered by a passing train in between. Their fleeting romance is seen in fragments and flashes through the speeding windows and gaps of the train. It’s a poignant optical illusion: the motion blur makes them look like an animated movie sequence that’s missing some frames. It’s also a poignant political illusion for a nation stuck between platforms: the frame-rate of love is distorted, until it finally disappears.

Santosh recently screened at the Red Lorry Film Festival 2025