Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Film myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.Films about novice cops tend to follow a similar pattern: a raw recruit moves from civvie innocence to uniformed empowerment, then to bleak disillusionment or, sometimes, total immersion in the abyss of personal and systemic corruption. The latest film to explore this path is Santosh, a brilliant fiction debut from British-Indian documentarist Sandhya Suri.Set in northern India, it stars Shahana Goswami as a young woman whose policeman husband is killed in a riot. Santosh appears to have no options ahead, but the government system of “compassionate appointment” allows her to inherit her husband’s job as a police officer.She is eager to do good, and seems to get the chance when a young woman from the Dalit caste — the so-called “untouchables” — is found dead. Santosh finds herself working on the case under a female superior, Inspector Sharma, played with imposing ambivalence by Sunita Rajwar. Seemingly of feminist convictions, the older cop plays an aunt-like mentor role to Santosh; but her motives are mixed, and Sharma proves as brutally ruthless as any of her male colleagues.Santosh herself quickly learns how to lean on innocents, and discovers that if she wants a scapegoat on whom to take out her rage at her husband’s death, then that is her prerogative as an officer. As a woman, her police uniform sometimes protects her, sometimes doesn’t — and sometimes gives her far more power than she can handle.As well as working rivetingly as a procedural thriller and a psychological study, Santosh has a hard, documentary-like edge, exploring Indian social phenomena — including Hindu-Muslim tensions, caste discrimination and entrenched misogyny — with intense analytical focus. In the lead, Goswami is all the more compelling because for much of the time, she says so little. Her Santosh watches, listens, responds, sometimes brutally — but the alertness of her gaze never subsides.★★★★★In UK cinemas from March 21
