Director: Sandyha Suri

Stars: Shahana Goswami, Sunita Rajwar, Nawal Shukla

British Indian writer-director Suri’s picture works both as a slow-burning thriller and as a blistering expose of corruption, misogyny, and prejudice. Goswami is the titular character, a recently widowed middle class Indian woman whose police officer husband was killed during a riot. Faced with these new financial challenges, Santosh decides to take advantage of the ‘compassionate appointment’ scheme, which allows a wife to take her husband’s job - remarkably this is a real scheme. Santosh is unimpressed by her new colleagues, a blithely corrupt and lazy bunch. When a lower caste Dalit girl is raped, murdered and her body dumped in a well, Santosh is ordered to transport the body to the morgue, her colleagues unwilling to associate themselves with anything lower caste. An investigation ensues which sees Santosh teaming up with the gruff, cynical older officer Geeta (Rajwar), to search for the victim’s ex-boyfriend. Following last year’s ‘All We Imagine as Light’, this is another gritty study of Indian life, worlds removed from Bollywood glitz, with cinematographer Lennert Hillege effectively evoking rural village life via grimy brown-hued cinematography. Goswami is excellent as a woman whose naivety and disillusion turns to dogged determination as the investigation proceeds, and Suri maintains a sure balance between riveting procedural and naturalistic drama.

David Willoughby

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