adbackhome or ad casino ‘Santosh’ Review: When Justice Isn’t Just

Watch a lot of international cinema, and certain border-transcending concerns tend to surface. This yearadbackhome or ad casino, I’ve seen many films about the myriad subtle ways that societies fence their women in. Sometimes there are blatantly misogynistic laws. But the character-driven storytelling at which movies excel is good for surfacing less obvious methods of subjection, including unspoken social taboos, ambient threats of violence and the indifference of men when women face injustice. I’ve seen this theme in movies from Iran (“The Seed of the Sacred Fig"), Japan (“Black Box Diaries”), Pakistan (“In Flames”), Malaysia (“Tiger Stripes”), Norway (“Armand”), Ireland (“Small Things Like These”) and, of course, the United States (“Good One,” “The Substance,” “Woman of the Hour”) — just to name a few.

“Santosh,” written and directed by Sandhya Suri, is another. Set in rural northern India, it is technically a crime drama in which a police officer investigates a murder. But it’s bigger than that: “Santosh” is equally about the methods by which the poor and oppressed are kept in their place, and about what it means to be woman among men who aren’t at all interested in sharing their power.

A math prodigy born to Holocaust survivors in Latvia, he had received his doctorate from, and spent his career at, Hebrew University in Jerusalem, where he became known for his work in a field called geometric group theory.

The police officer at the center of this story hadn’t planned to be one. After two years of marriage, Santosh Saini (Shahana Goswami) her beloved husband, a police constable, dies. Heartbroken and largely abandoned by her in-laws, she inherits his job, an unusual turn of events, but not a bad one. She joins the force, wearing a khaki uniform and working alongside the few women there and a host of loutish men.

One day she overhears a father talking about his missing teenage daughter. When her body turns up, it’s evident she has been raped and murdered. But her family is Dalit, the lowest in the caste hierarchy, and the authorities are not inclined to care about her death until a Muslim boy becomes the suspect, triggering the community’s Islamophobia.

Geeta Sharma (Sunita Rajwar), a prominent female officer, is put in charge of the investigation, and enlists Santosh as her right-hand woman and de facto mentee. It’s a good fit: Santosh, worried about the girl’s family and horrified by what has happened, is determined to find out what’s going on.

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