In June of 2018, The Thomson Reuters Foundation released the results of a study that showed India as the most dangerous country in the world for women. It beat countries like Afghanistan, Somalia, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Nigeria, and even the U.S., all of which made the top 10. It’s through that lens in which we’re able to contextualize Soni, a new Netflix release from India, where we follow the lives of two women who work for the police in Delhi, Soni (Geetika Vidya Ohlyan), a police officer, and Kalpana (Saloni Batra), her superintendent. The film is light on plot, but heavy on ideas and theme, specifically that of the day-to-day resilience of women who face indignities every day.
Director and co-writer, Ivan Ayr, was inspired to write this based on the infamous 2012 Delhi gang rape case that caught national attention. The film, thankfully, isn’t about a gang rape, but it is about the culture that inspired it and allows it to thrive. It deals in situations women face ranging from mean jokes about periods in schools to brutal assaults. You never see anything happen on screen, but you do see the effect they have on our characters be it physical scars or mental scars.
Ayr also takes a rather interesting approach to his filmmaking here. Each individual scene is done in one long, continuous take. It’s not showy, and it doesn’t call attention to itself, which almost makes you take a while to notice like it did for me. At first, I also didn’t understand why the choice was being made until it eventually dawned on me. One of the great effects of a tracking shot is the ability to create and hold tension for a period of time. As a result, there are a number of scenes where the camera casually tracks our character, and an uneasiness begins to build. You begin to expect something bad to happen, but then it just cuts to the next scene. The brilliance of that is that it puts you in the mindset of what it’s like being a woman, and having to constantly be on edge because the world around you isn’t safe, and there’s almost always someone just waiting for the opportunity to do something, even though nothing ever happens…at least, until something does.
However, the extensive use of tracking shots is also a double edged sword here. If you look at someone like Steven Spielberg, he also makes plenty of long, tracking shots in his films, but they are always effective in his films because they are meticulously blocked and framed for maximum emotional impact, and that’s what is missing here. Ayr is no Spielberg, and I’m aware that it’s not necessarily a fair comparison, but for the most part, the thought process behind each shot just feels like, “alright, just follow her, and make sure she stays in frame,” and that’s it. It ends up making the film emotionally distant, so while I can take in its ideas and messages intellectually, I rarely get the opportunity to feel it on a gut level. Plus, there is often the occasional scene where utilizing a long take was genuinely pointless, and didn’t particularly add anything to the experience.
That said, the performances are strong. Ohlyan and Batra feel very natural, they have a solid command of the screen, and they’re able to express a lot of complicated thoughts and feelings with few words and mere glances. Ohlyan is a compelling lead as the hot-head cop who is passionate about what she does, but often finds herself too caught up in her own frustrations with the world and the systems that allow bad men to get away. Batra captures the feeling of trying to work within a system, and hoping to create change in a very by-the-book way, and they way she equally clashes and empathizes with Soni’s rage makes for a nifty dynamic.
Soni is a bit too cold for me to call it great, but there’s more than enough here to still consider it a very good, and, in many ways, necessary viewing. Observing social changes in India from the U.S. has always seemed to me like it constantly takes on step forward, and then two steps back. Modern technology has been able to bring stories about harassment, assault, and other forms of oppression to the forefront, and it’s something that people, not just in India, but around the world need to confront. Soni holds a mirror to a world that seems to actively make life for 50% of the world’s population a living hell, and while it’s outlook might seem bleak, there is still a glimmer of hope and catharsis that is hopefully waiting.