Can you imagine the Indian policy of compassionate appointment being applied in the UK? If your husband is killed, a wife or older children can take over his work to help with the financial hardship of losing the breadwinner. This is what happens to Santosh when her husband is killed during a riot. She takes the work to escape her moaning in-laws, it was after all a love marriage.

In the police, Santosh meets torture dished out to prisoners, corruption, sexism, caste prejudice and anti-muslim sentiments. A young girl is murdered and thrown in the well of a Dalit community several days after a dead cat was found in there. This has poisoned the village water meaning that the women must go much further to collect it.

Geeta, a higher ranking police woman, is brought in to deal with the rising tensions with the local communities and becomes a mentor for Santosh and this is the only relationship we see throughout the film. What it does well is to show how the nuanced decisions and violent behaviours of the police enable a rough justice. The guilty, however, being a higher caste, fear no retribution and continue to act in ways which are provacative and outside the law and become the new ‘untouchables’ for very different reasons.

There are several moments which are quite shocking. In seeking out the young Muslim boy, Santosh visits to a small restaurant in civilian clothing and is visibly stripped of her protection that the uniform provides. In order to stop a man staring at her while she eats, she stuffs her face full of the food and then pretends to voimt it back out causing the man to turn away. It’s shocking because of the action but also because what policing has taught her is that you have to be brutal in order to snatch back your right to be there. Colonialism always and its after effects always rears its ugly head.

This isn’t a high-octane plice thriller but a quieter, more realistic look at a slice of life in India through the eyes of a police procedural.

As Santosh becomes more and more unable to sleep, she questions what she is doing and decides that she can’t change the system and the last thing we see is her sitting on a train to Mumbai, but to what it is unclear.

8/10