Writer-director Karan Kandhari’s mischievous and daring feature debut Sister Midnight is a fever dream that veers wildly and often thrillingly between tones: psychological drama, dark domestic comedy, surreal horror fable, and something more inscrutable still. The 119-minute film is anchored by Radhika Apte’s phenomenal turn as an unhappy and restless woman transplanted to the isolating corners of modern-day Mumbai from her rural village only to be caught in circumstances too strange to summarize.
Among the litany of stylistic flourishes that Kandhari employs throughout Sister Midnight — the title is presumably a nod to Iggy Pop — the one thread that ties them all is the film’s relentless energy, a comically aggressive attitude that is simultaneously abrasive and committed. It’s an ambitious, at times jarring ride that disregards easy categorisation and convention, making it a Hindi film that needs to be seen to be truly experienced, a rarity in the age of one-line plots and spoiler-reliant narratives. And so, by the time the credits roll, it matters little that Sister Midnight does not quite come together neatly but more, that it looks, feels, and sounds like a film that resists any kind of creative compromise.
The BAFTA-nominated film which premiered at the Directors’ Fortnight sidebar at Cannes last year, opens with jarring silence — there’s a train ride, a slumped groom, and a bride in ceremonial bangles — in an extended dialogue-less sequence that lasts about 10 minutes. It sets the tone for the silent-movie comic route that Kandharai adopts in a story about a young newlywed couple who arrive in the city by train.
Uma (Radhika Apte) and Gopal (Ashok Pathak) might belong to the same village but from the start, it’s evident that as a couple, they seem ill-suited to each other. They move into a small, window-less, one-room chawl and barely speak. Their first night together is an awkward physical comedy staged so satisfyingly that it can be a universe of its own.
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In the coming days, Gopal drinks himself to sleep while Uma smokes on the balcony, sizing up a life that already feels like a cage. The awkwardness is compounded by the fact that Uma’s timid husband is content in their relationship remaining asexual, unable to even undress in front of her — in one scene, he responds to her sexual advances with an anti-climactic handshake. It also doesn’t help that Uma exhibits no interest in the routines of domesticity.
We see as she tries to chop vegetables, fails to cook rice, and swears at the walls. Days blur into nights. The loneliness deepens — and mutates. She wanders the city, takes a job as a cleaner in a distant office tower, and befriends an elevator operator. Her cravings turn strange. Birds vanish. Blood appears. The women next door laugh too loudly. A herd of zombie goats gathers. And Uma, once unsure even how to sleep beside her husband, begins to walk the city like it owes her something.
Sister Midnight could have played out like dozens of other Hindi films that mine the tragic comedy in unfulfilling arranged marriages churned out every year. Instead, it offers us a picture of a disintegrating psyche and otherness so haunting and trippy that it feels like a disservice to label the film as an arranged marriage film.
Kandhari’s gaze, at times reminiscent of the deadpan absurdity of Aki Kaurismaki and the simmering fury of Ana Lily Amirpour’s A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014), lets the horror creep in like mildew until Uma is no longer adjusting to life but rather, unraveling it. Rather than relying on spoken word — the screenplay has sparse dialogue anyway — the filmmaker constructs the film primarily through a pulpy visual language.
That allows Sverre Sørdal’s cinematography to speak volumes through its bold framing, sharp contrasts of light and shadow, and playful deviations from traditional composition rules — all of which deepen the portrait we build of Uma’s psyche in front of our eyes. The film’s assured editing breaks down Kandhari’s vision into punchy, vignette-like segments that straddle rhythm and narrative tension.
Radhika Apte’s presence becomes the still point in Sister Midnight’s strange orbit, drawing the audience into her world even as it spirals endlessly.
And then there are the big swings that Kandhari takes, deploying devices like stop-motion animation, an eclectic soundtrack that merges Cambodian ballad with The Stooges, and heightened metaphors about outcasts and urban malaise, that blur realism with absurdity without losing sight of its emotional core. Some stick, some don’t (especially a comic-book twist in the film’s latter half) but Kandhari’s insistence on ensuring Sister Midnight stays rooted in Uma’s isolated experience, even as bizarre and unexpected events unfold, make it almost seem like that’s the whole point.
By that I mean to say, Sister Midnight is a film that feels directed specifically towards our shrinking attention spans. It is a film that doesn’t believe in payoffs as a narrative rule, rather one that revels in its frenetic, at times, jarring disjointed quality. Ideas are held together less and embraced more for their vibes. It’s almost as if in extracting an all-consuming sensory experience out of the stray colours, noises, mores, and personalities that populate a city of 21 million, Kandhari is challenging audiences to rethink their own restlessness.
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Still, as deft as Kandhari is in staging the entire conceit that makes up Sister Midnight, none of it would have legs on their own if it wasn’t for Apte’s commanding presence and her feral turn. The gifted actor is allowed to channel the peak of her physical comedy prowess (shades of which was visible earlier in Vasan Bala’s winsone Monica, O My Darling) contorting her body and facial expressions almost on command. If, in other films, the absence of dialogue has the potential to become a misstep, in Sister Midnightit almost becomes a blessing.
It’s evident that Apte, who can load a movement as simple as a wave of her hand with hilarious tragedy, clearly doesn’t need dialogue to tell a story or to give her character vivid interiority. She deadpans between the extreme attitudes that Uma wears in a way that makes her isolation all the more moving. And when she does speak, she wields her lines like a machete.
Her presence becomes the still point in Sister Midnight’s strange orbit, drawing the audience into her world even as it spirals endlessly. And in the end, for all its surreal detours and visual bravado, Sister Midnight lingers because it never loses sight of Uma — a woman trying, against absurd odds, to hold onto her sense of self in a world that keeps asking her to disappear.
(Sister Midnight is currently playing in theatres)
