Movies in the Mountains: Santosh

Filmmaker Sandhya Suri’s searing narrative debut follows a young housewife (Shahana Goswami) widowed after her police constable husband is killed on the job. Through a government initiative, she is trained to take his place in an overwhelmingly police station in rural Northern India, where she works mostly with men. Suri blends a journalistic attention to procedural detail — expertly building tension as evidence and characters are revealed — with an empathetic rendering of Santosh’s internal conflicts. She seeks professional advancement and respect from her peers while clinging to ethics in a system that prioritizes suspect confessions and convictions by any means.