Synopsis:
Newly widowed Santosh inherits her husband's job as a police constable in the rural badlands of Northern India. When a girl's body is found, she's pulled into the investigation under the wing of charismatic feminist inspector Sharma.
Movie Review:
Things aren't just as they appear in Sandhya Suri's Santosh. Yes, it's about misogyny in the sense that Santosh Saini (Shahana Goswami) is left with nothing as a widow of a "love marriage"—her in-laws won't take her because she "stole" him, her home is government property owned by the police force where he worked, and going back to her parents feels like a death sentence. But that's more about the why of joining the force herself (if she takes her husband's job, she gets his salary and widow benefits on top of a room wherever she's posted) than it is about what she will ultimately see and do as a result. India might be a patriarchal society prone to gender discrimination, but it can also be very racist.
Santosh learns this first-hand upon taking the initiative to find a Dalit man's fifteen-year-old daughter who's gone missing. The station itself doesn't want India's lowest caste to come to them so it can preserve its "sanitation," so they force the community to pay others to write their reports for them. While still in training, the newly minted Constable Saini hears his plight while at the cobbler and tells him to follow her so she can write the report herself and ensure an investigation can begin promptly. Her boss refuses. He sends him back to the cobbler with a laugh. Well, you can guess that the next time we see that father will be with tears in his eyes and the dead girl's body in his arms.