‘Sister Midnight’ movie review: Radhika Apte elevates this punk black comedy

Radhika Apte in ‘Sister Midnight’

At first glance, Sister Midnight, Karan Kandhari’s morbidly funny debut feature, looks like a static portrait of marital inertia. There’s a new bride pouting in a Mumbai chawl, slumped under the weight of expectations and boredom. The frequently immobile camera watches as Radhika Apte’s Uma shuffles around her one-room box of a home, staring into the infinity of its walls. For a while, that’s about it. Just a slow-motion descent into the slow cooker of domestic life that’s almost aggressively mundane.

But the trick of Sister Midnight is that this banality is the bait, and soon enough the hook reveals itself. Beneath the macabre sitcom setup and the Wes Anderson-like symmetry, there’s something far stranger going on. Uma chances upon a goat, dead birds begin to accumulate, but at least her fever has subsided. Having begun the film as a grumpy wife, Uma starts to mutate into something else entirely. 

Kandhari, who is Indian by origin but London-based, channels a particularly diasporic vision of Mumbai that’s intimate, but also quite surreal. The film’s chawl setting is crammed with gossiping aunties and open windows and often feels claustrophobic, but also buzzes with a foreboding menace. Cinematographer Sverre Sordal lights these back alleys like dream sequences. Drab fluorescent interiors clash with sinister noirish shadows, and everything looks just slightly off.

Much of the movie rests on Apte’s shoulders, and she carries it like a woman hauling centuries of baggage. Uma sulks, spits, stomps, slouches, and seethes. Her barbs feel militant, and even her silences throb with insult. There’s barely any exposition, but Apte and Kandhari give us all we need from a single glance on her hostage-sequence-like wedding night, to her soft-spoken husband’s polite refusals for any semblance of intimacy.

The genre gradually slides out from under the bed. The first half is kitchen sink absurdism, while the second has a fable-like feel to it. Kandhari doesn’t make the transition seamless, but he makes it feel earned. The bratty interloper in Uma soon grows into something more mythic. Her transformation into a symbolic stand-in for Kali is teased through colour, gesture, and ritual. Her face even glows blue at just the right moment, and one character even remarks she’s “looking a bit more kali today,” with just the right weight that pun deserves.

The film is peppered with delightful digressions like a Kurosawa parody playing on a teahouse television, a band of helpful trans women offering some chai and a shoulder, and a sombre lift operator who seems to be Uma’s only emotional peer. Kandhari never quite ties these threads into a cohesive tapestry, but that’s part of the point. His world is stitched together from the freakish leftovers of society.

Kandhari’s flirtations with vampire mythology are quite provocative and fun to witness. With its jarring edits, brash needle-drops, and near-expressionist lighting, the film channels a feral, Jaramuschian brand of punk, using the undead as metaphors for the unkillable rage of a woman who’s had enough.

However, Sister Midnight does sometimes lose control of its tone. The slapstick rhythms of its jump cuts, whip pans and sound gags begin to feel mechanised by the one-hour mark, and its tight visual language also becomes something of a constraint, as though the story is trying to scream through a very tiny symmetrical window.

Sister Midnight is not a tidy film, and often lacks consistency. But it’s thrillingly alive, especially in how it weaponises discomfort and turns the Yellow Wallpaper-trope of the neglected housewife into something folkloric. Kandhari’s instincts occasionally betray him when he throws in a few too many motifs without always knowing where they land, but he’s unmistakably a filmmaker with a vision, and a wicked sense of humour.

Sister Midnight is currently running in theatres