In Sandhya Suri’s narrative feature debut, a widow and a notorious police inspector try to solve the gruesome murder of a teenager.

Halfway through Sandhya Suri’s engrossing police procedural Santosh, an older police officer (Sunita Rajwar) reminds a younger constable (Shahana Goswami) that when it comes to criminal cases, everyone — from the victim’s family to the detectives — is playing a role. One party lodges an accusation and the other delivers justice. Whether things are based in truth or reality counts less than one might think. The sentiment, hardly comforting to begin with, adopts a more sinister dimension later in the film, when the two women race against time to find the person who murdered a teenage girl in the Dalit community of a small town in northern India. 

Santosh began working as a police officer because of a government program that allows widows of deceased cops to inherit their jobs. Santosh, which premiered at Cannes in Un Certain Regard and was recently acquired by Metrograph for North American distribution, opens with the death of the titular character’s husband, an event that upends Santosh’s life. Unable to return to her own family and rejected by her in-laws, the widow decides to support herself as a police officer. Suri’s film chronicles the kind of moral regression caused by the job. Santosh enters the profession intending, it seems, to cause little harm, but corruption proves too insidious a force. 

Goswami, as the anchor of the film, offers a particularly riveting turn, which adds an urgent layer to Suri’s screenplay. Devika’s case becomes a litmus test for Santosh, whose increasing desperation to find the culprit drives her to make choices more characteristic of Sharma. Further detail about her motivations as they relate to her grief might have been helpful, but Goswami plays her character with an appropriate amount of pathos that clarifies the Machiavellian culture of police officers. 

After finding the teenager’s phone, Santosh and Sharma focus their attention on locating the young man Devika had been texting right before her death. The facts of the case take a backseat to the adrenaline rush of having a real lead. Suri’s direction, already confident from the opening moments, is deft as the film shifts to match the increasingly frenzied mood. Lennert Hillege’s cinematography casts aside the observational, almost documentary approach for more feverish and claustrophobic camerawork. As Santosh closes in on the suspect, who has absconded for another town, Suri’s film embraces the nail-biting aesthetics — dark and shadowy locales, heart-racing music — of a classic procedural. 

This assured sense of direction coupled with controlled performances make Santosh a compelling drama. But it’s Suri’s screenplay that renders the film immersive. The director smartly imbues this low-key, intimate narrative with details that lay out the political reality of India. Instead of unwieldy expository dialogue, Suri relies on conversations between Santosh and Sharma to shed light on the forces — a discriminatory society, a corrupt workplace — that might drive these two women into a kind of reluctant Faustian alliance.