Santosh

Caste Couch

Santosh
Directed by Sandhya Suri
UK/Germany/India/France 2024
BBC/BFI
London Film Festival 18/10/24

Either the films at this year’s London Film Festival are a really bad bunch or, I suspect more likely, the way they’ve been marketed in this year’s brochure is pretty underwhelming and not the push they needed. Especially if you don’t go for the big gala films, since they’re probably more likely to get a proper release somewhere down the line anyway. Either way, this is the only film I‘ve come to this year but, luckily for me it’s a real gem of a movie.

Santosh deals with the titular character, Santosh Saini, played by the brilliant Shahana Goswami. She has been widowed when her husband, a local police constable, is killed by some anonymous person in a riot. Rejected by her husband’s family, Santosh takes advantage of a system in India where you can be trained up for and inherit your spouse’s job after their death (called ‘compassionate appointment’). So it’s not long after washing the blood off her dead husband’s uniform that she’s similarly attired and learning how to police her designated region. And then, when a local girl is found raped, murdered and stuffed down a well, she becomes a kind of apprentice to a higher up police woman, Sharma, played by Sunita Rajwar, as they try to find the killer and bring him to justice. Or is that really what’s going on?

Okay, so this is not your standard police procedural. Santosh is a study of the police which takes the title character on a journey as she realises the true nature and consequences of the organisation she works for... a police force clearly hated by the people they are trying to govern. And perhaps rightly so.

Starting from a chaotic pre-title sequence as Santosh rushes into the aftermath of a riot, looking for her husband, rendered with jerky, hand held camera... the film then progresses into a slower, more controlled visual environment (for the most part) but this does nothing to still the pace of what is an unrelenting look at a milieu where all of the characters are unshakably rendered in shades of grey. There are no black and white demarcations of right and wrong represented in this picture... everything is flexible and blurry in that regard.

Take Santosh herself, for example. A little way into her career as a cop, she finds she’s accidentally taken a cash bribe, before she even knows that she’s done it. When she realises what’s just happened, she looks at her partner who smiles at her and she smiles back, happy to accept the cash. Later, her quite violent outburst during the interrogation of a prisoner leaves her confused about what she’s taken part in and, when she begins to revisit her detection work which brought her to this point, making her something of a local hero within her branch, her realisation of the events in the movie up to this point begin to unravel and she begins to seriously question the nature and hierarchy of the constabulary and, especially, her own place in it.

The film is absolutely gripping and the way in which director Suri shoots it is, perhaps, a sign of her previous career choices as a documentary film maker, with a real fly-on-the-wall attitude to her key protagonists. Indeed, contrasted to some beautiful shot compositions, framing people in vertical slabs of the screen, sometimes people won’t even be fully in a shot and Suri will instead concentrate on their feet only, for example, to bring the audience into the next scene... such as a moment where, instead of following a police officer in the normal manner, she will just make the bag of water bottles hanging from his hand from the waste down the main focus of a shot, taking you on that short journey in a way, with the jiggling of the bag, that acts as a contrast to the more serene camera movements before and after this sequence, for a bit. Similarly, when Santosh contributes to a violent assault on her suspect, the focus is the sound and fury of her arm swinging to meet her victim ‘off shot’, with the director making sure you really feel the violence, instead of merely seeing it.

A long undercover search of a nearby city where Santosh is alone and trying to track down said suspect is also very visceral in the way the camera keeps you on the edge of your seat, with a tension that is palpable and makes you wonder if the character will find her way safely out of the situation she so desperately seeks to find herself in... or if the film will take another turn.

Then there’s the conclusion of the movie, such as it is. Every time I thought I was witnessing the last scene, something else would happen and it would continue for a few minutes more minutes again, like a series of Matryoshka dolls slowly revealing another incident or idea. Now, it would be easy for me to just say that the ending of the film is something the audience will bring their own baggage to but, I suspect, it’s more conclusive than I thought and I perhaps didn’t quite understand the last few minutes... like the symbolism of Santosh giving a particular item to a child in payment of a packet of biscuits (although I think I’ve got more of a handle on that now, as I’ve slept and had 12 hours distance from the film).

What I can say is that there’s an absolutely fascinating shot near the end where Santosh is waiting on a crowded train platform at night. She is watching a young couple on the opposite platform when, what must be one heck of a long train obscures the view from both her and the audience. We see the rushing pitch darkness of the speeding train directly in front of the camera, punctuated by short, half second bursts of the changing image of the young couple in the gaps between carriages as the train whizzes past. It’s somewhat entrancing and the reverse shot of this, when it comes, is probably to be expected but... well... what Santosh does next is something which I certainly have my own interpretation of... a kind of acceptance to swim with the tide for the greater good in the face of the corruption inherent in the caste system and the real powers of the police (if I’m understanding this correctly... I know nothing of Indian culture really other than what I’ve seen in this film).

And I think this is where I leave this one other than to say, Santosh is an absolute corker of a movie and I hope it does well enough (I believe it’s been submitted as best foreign film in the 2025 Oscars... I didn’t realise this when I booked the ticket or was sitting in the cinema watching it) to get a lot of eyes on it. Brilliantly written and directed by Suri, with absolutely stand out performances by Goswami and Rajwar and a kind of hard edged look at both the corruption stemming from the hierarchy of the Indian culture and also more than a passing nod to the place of ‘the female’ in that specific society. I hope there’s a Blu Ray release in this film’s future because I’d definitely like to see this one again.