‘Santosh’ Movie Review: Sandhya Surri’s layered procedural power dissections

Still ‘Santosh’. Photo Credit: Vertigo Films

In Sandhya Suri SatisfactionA young Dalit girl has been murdered and her body is found floating well in a village. But it reflects in indifference, procedural inertia, and affectioning shrugs and sideways, which she feels more criminal, more evil in any way. Dead prey, as these things often go, is secondary. Instead, meditation is on how a living response occurs, opposite itself around the discomfort of injustice, and how the system metabolizes the tragedy. Its center is at the center of all the title Santosh, who is an unleashed police constable, who does not consider the post of her dead husband to be so civil duty, but is the only option to face the neck of her bitter in -laws.

A terrible Shahna Goswami played the role of Santosh, as if someone is still getting used to the weight of his new uniform. He is not a crusade. She simply wants a way to avoid swallowing a roof, a salary, and wideliness on her head. But on the first day, she throws a headfresp in a case that is already unrelated to the simple reason that no one in power wants to solve it. The girl’s cruel corpse is located on a melting snow slab and the police remain disgusting indifferently and unbalanced. Santosh initially does what any proper person will do – he sees, listens and learns the rules.

The rebel wrong police commissioner, who has a surefire belief in the primary ability to suffer the primary ability for his job, has been rapidly replaced by Inspector Geeta Sharma. A tremendous Sunita is played by Sunita Rajwar, Sharma raises an almost unconscious threat that makes you a little stressful, the way you do when a teacher walks into a room with a reputation. He is a practical manner in which only long -weather bureaucrats can be. Justice is not the goal, but another smokscreen, a cook in the machine, and its job is to keep the shame on. Meanwhile, Greenhorn satisfaction is treated like a raw material, which is waiting for shape. The attentive (and sometimes) of Sharma learns to taste small, everyday pleasures of satisfaction power, under the eye. Goswami carried out this slow corruption excellently; His face is a study in barely comprehensible changes, giving way to solve the shimmering of hesitation, the shape of disillusionment like a permanent shade.

Still ‘Santosh’. Photo Credit: Vertigo Films

Suri’s direction is ineffective (which is a humble way to say that she does not specifically care about what you entertain). She is not interested in the congestion of the transient adrenaline of your specific procedural thriller, even though the film has some edge stress. She creates suspense through everyday agreement that does not compromise for a day until one day you wake up and feel that you become someone else completely. Cinematography bends in this, implicates its characters in a static frame, which boxing in the houses of the Tight Police Station, Crumpling village, and the dingi, the street of the half-urban haemlets suffocated.

One of the most influential victory of the film is the use of non-actors, who basically slip in the screen and ask you that the performance ends and the reality begins. There is no adverse, no self-consciousness-people live in their skin, moving through the film as they have always been. This is this uncontrolled authenticity that makes the film feel very far to feel far away.

Great trick of Satisfaction Something is presenting power in the form of something that never comes as a grand temptation. It seeps surgically, offers small, equitable trespasted because the rules ever bend so little until it becomes a habit of bending. Santosh, like so much before that, just starts trying to survive. But existence in the Indian police force (or any police force, for that case) is hardly any neutral work. The uniform does not provide grants to the authority; It demands complexity. And so without realizing it, Santosh absorbs the hierarous of the caste that decides that the one who is worth protecting and which is disposable, communal politics that makes some suspects more “guilty” than others, and institutional misunderstandings that ensure its power, is only reluctant – the congratulations of those men who can cancel it. The film ever preachs about these structures because it is not required. They are simply there, as is unavoidable and unavoidable as a dead body, which turns into a well of a Dalit village.

Still ‘Santosh’. Photo Credit: Vertigo Films

Rajwar left the thesis of the film in a scary, insidious line – “There are two types of untouchables in this country: they do not want to touch anyone, and who cannot be touched”. This is one of the few moments where Satisfaction Instead of giving your comment slip through offhanded comments and accidental cruelty, gives your card on the table.

A minor grip: Suri starts fluttering in the last stretch. After spending so much time in the severe, condemnable argument of the system, she suddenly feels forced to streamlined things, so that satisfaction can return a lifeline from the moral abyss. It is a small betrayal that does not waste the final task so much because it reveals an unconscious hesitation in the cruel dissection of the film’s otherwise Shakti.

Of course, the biggest irony Satisfaction It is that it has been observed internationally – the official presenting of the UK for the Oscars – it remains at home in the censorship limbo. The delicate knowledge of the Indian sensor has demanded changes (perhaps heavy people), and the filmmaker, for his credit, is denying the breeze. And so, the film sits in bureaucracy, a completely fitting fate for a film, which understands, is the best, why justice is never a guarantee.

Santosh was displayed at the Red Lawry Film Festival 2025