Santosh review – carefully draws you into its dismal intrigue

It’s been two decades since filmmaker Sandhya Suri launched her filmmaking career with the moving 2005 cine-diary, I For India, about her integration into UK society as the daughter of Indian immigrants. Santosh is her fiction feature debut, and it’s a very different beast formally and tonally, but still interested in questions of identity and the swaggering misogyny of the patriarchy within Indian society.

Shahana Goswami plays the terse, unsmiling widow of the title who decides to take advantage of a bizarre government loophole which allows her to assume her husband’s job as a local police inspector as a way to retain her state-funded accommodation. She accepts, not wanting to return to live with the evil mother-in-law, but on day one is party to the extreme corruption and bigotry exercised by both male and female colleagues. And in becoming embroiled in a murder case involving a young girl, Santosh also gets to experience the extreme inequalities of the caste system first hand.

It’s a slow, detailed procedural, one which carefully draws you into its dismal intrigue – and it’s engrossing for much of its runtime. It’s a shame that Suri has chosen not to run with some of the ambiguities she embraces in the first half, and goes to tiresome lengths to try and absolve Santosh of any moral sin.