NOTHING IS MORE DANGEROUS THAN FOLLOWING ORDERS.

When her husband, a police officer, is killed during a riot, Santosh Saini (Shahana Goswami) is told that a law gives her the chance to take his job; the murder of a young girl becomes a challenging case for this rookie.

That law may sound like a contrived set-up for a movie, but it’s a real one, and documentary filmmaker Sandhya Suri was also inspired by a notorious, widely publicized case in 2012 where a young woman was gang raped by several men on a bus.

This is Suri’s narrative feature debut, one that addresses issues that are urgent in India: misogyny, Islamophobia and corruption. Excellent cast in a grim drama that ends with a ray of light.

2024-U.K.-India-Germany-France. 120 min. Color. Widescreen. Written and directed by Sandhya Suri. Cast: Shahana Goswami (Santosh Saini), Sunita Rajwar (Geeta Sharma), Nawal Shukla (Thakur), Pratibha Awasthy, Prashant Kumar, Manjul Azad. 

Last word: “In 2012, we had this horrific gang rape [of Jyoti Singh] on the bus, the Nirbhaya case. I saw a photograph which really struck me which was female protesters, absolutely enraged and spitting with hatred. And they’re facing this Constable, a female Constable. Her visor was half down, but what was left of her face that I could see was so enigmatic, the expression. I was hooked. I’m like, ‘Oh, my God, that’s how I tell the story.’ I tell it through her. I tell it through her because she’s both things. She’s a perpetrator, she’s a victim, she experiences their power, but she’s also powerless.” (Suri, The Hollywood Reporter)