Though the awards season is won and done, you still may have slept on one of the finest acting performances of 2024: Shahana Goswami as the titular character in Sandhya Suri's film Santosh.
When the widow Santosh Saini steps into her late husband's role as a police officer, she finds herself investigating the murder of a young girl, and through her story the audience experiences first hand the power and gender struggles faced by the women (and men) in the story.
The film is honest, raw, and a masterclass in layered storytelling enhanced by Goswami's own performance. Born in New Delhi, the actress quietly spent years cutting her teeth in theatre both behind the scenes and on stage before landing her first on-screen role in Yun Hota Toh Kya Hota (2006). Almost 20 years later, in Santosh, the actress finds herself playing what may be one of the defining roles of her career thus far. Across Zoom, she tells me about how discovering the character was no easy feat:
"I don't have much of a process. In fact, for Santosh, I thought that I would find a process and do some sort of homework and maybe work on her body language or her work and really try to kind of understand who she is before I play her.
And it just didn't come naturally to me. Every time I would make time to do that, something just felt awkward and I couldn't get myself to do anything, until the point that it was one day before shoot, and I cried the night before shoot because I said, "I don't know who she is. I don't know what I'm going to do. I don't know why they've taken me. They're going to realize that they made a mistake, and I'm not the right person for this."
And then I realized that this is just because the minute you start kind of attributing ways of doing something onto yourself, which is not natural to you.
There [are] so many actor friends of mine who I admire, whose work I admire, and we talk about things and we [...] discussed their processes and things. And I keep feeling like, "maybe I'm lazy, maybe I don't do enough."
But then I realize that's not true because I take my work very seriously. It's just that I have a much more instinctive approach to it, and it's more internal for me then than actually doing something. When I try to force myself to have a process, it didn't work, it didn't happen, it didn't come. Then I think day by day, each day, you kind of get more into it and you get a lot of help and support as an actor from the team, from the environment.
... you start interacting with the world and the universe and the people, the other characters in it... it starts coming out and slowly you realize, "oh, you found that character from within yourself somewhere"."
The self-control and tension that exists within Santosh's life can be felt with every action, every twitch of a muscle, every breath and action that Goswami commits to. It is a performance of restraint (until it isn't), a reflection of the deep discomfort and tension that the audience is meant to feel. No soundtrack is needed here: the reality and truth of the situation hits in every scene.
Perhaps it is no surprise that Goswami has been able to craft one of the best performances of her career after twenty years in the industry and a background in theatre. Her own filmography is full of eclectic and diverse choices: from Debbie in musical drama Rock On! (2008), the lead role of Lila in Vara: A Blessing (2013), and the more lighthearted Kavya in Tu Hai Mera Sunday (2016).
Santosh sees Goswami push herself in a lead role for the first time in ten years, via one of the most raw and honest characters she's ever played.
"I think I was proud of my journey with the film and my ability to hold it all together for myself, along with the support of everybody else.
... think it was just a reminder of the fact that I am ready to be bigger, to play bigger, to own bigger. And that's not from an egotistical space, and neither is it from a space of greed.
But it's actually eliminating the fear that I had. Like, now I'm okay to embrace the bigness of my own abilities."
Through the microcosm of Santosh's life and her relationship with her superior Geeta Sharma (played by veteran actress Sunita Rajwar), we learn to understand the complexity of the lives that these female police officers live, and how justice may not look as it seems.
Both Santosh and Sharma have many moments when they seem to need to shift skins in order to be comfortable in the space, where even alone (especially in the case of Santosh), being ones self is not easy.
Whilst the subject matter looms large throughout the entire piece, Santosh and Sharma's own relationship and interactions are a highlight of the film. What does it mean to be a woman supporting women? What does it mean to stand up and give a voice to women? And are some things ultimately human, no matter which way you look at it?
"What I loved about Santosh is that it in in the writing, Sandhya managed to bring about a certain honesty, but without judgment; and yet it leaves the audience to see where their prejudices and biases lie because it's almost like a mirror to society, to the world we live in, to the tiny little ways in which we discriminate.
... I feel like because the film also talks about not just social aspects or all the various kinds of social aspects: whether it's gender, whether it's economic backgrounds, whether it's caste, politics, hierarchy, power... but it also talks about human emotions and, ambiguous nature of human behaviour which is contextual and circumstantial."
Born in New Delhi, Goswami is a positive, calming and thoughtful presence as we speak, a far cry from her character that seems to struggle to speak at times. Audiences unfamiliar with Indian cinema or television may remember her from BBC One's A Suitable Boy (2020), Hush Hush (2022) on Amazon Prime, or Netflix's Bombay Begums (2021). However, Santosh has achieved international acclaim, receiving nominations at Cannes Film Festival, the BFI London Film Festival, and was Britain's official nomination for the Oscars. Despite all of this, Goswami has found time to enjoy the journey.
"I'm beginning to have fun with life," she tells me. "And the roller coaster nature of it is now not feeling as scary, but it's feeling exciting, you know? There is less of an attachment to wanting things to always be good or wallowing too much in thinking that things might never change.
It's kind of having fun with the twists and turns in the plot and looking at it like a film actually; just, trying to see one's own life as a video game or a film that's playing out and you're like, "Oh, interesting. Let's see what happens next."
Even if it's not as you planned it to go. So I'm having fun with life, and I'm having fun with discovering aspects of myself."
Perhaps it is this thoughtfulness that explains how and why, throughout Santosh, Goswami manages to pull the audience closely into the internal world of the character: we feel as she feels, the good and the bad.
In the film, there are characters that are set up to be 'bad' in some form. For some of them, this manifests in callousness. For others, this is seen through an explicit (or implicit) manipulation of the power they hold. Yet Santosh herself is also not put on a pedestal. This is not a paint-by-numbers Hollywood movie where she is meant to swoop in and save the day like a paragon of virtue. She is palpably flawed, due to a mixture of her own experiences and biases, and the grief that still remains close to her heart.
When she does actions we might question - in terms of their pure moral value - we also question ourselves. Would we do the same in this position? And what does this mean regarding how we do or don't trust justice to prevail?
The movie - and Santosh herself - suggests what they hope the answers to these questions might be. But humanity does not find answers by following a script, but by listening to others, as well as ourselves.
"We've started mistaking distractions for joy," she muses at the end. "I think it's a good time to really explore joy. What really makes us happy. What really brings glee and a sense of upliftment in us.
... I really wish for people to be able to connect to that side. I read a nice quote recently about: "the ego is serious and the soul is joyful". So we have to find a way to kind of get back into the the soul's energy of joy and lightness.
That's not to say that one will not go through difficult experiences, but we don't have to take them so seriously and get so pulled down by them. Joy is not always about being happy, but joy is about being able to see a silver lining."
It is impossible to watch Santosh and not be moved deeply by the story that Sandhya Suri the rest of the talented team convey. Yet the strong, sometimes powerful, often hopeful response to the work shows exactly why movies such as Santosh, and performances such as Goswami's re so important. Amidst the darkness and the struggle, there is hope in the possibility of tomorrow.
Or as Goswami might put it, there is a silver lining.
