Sister Midnight

Karan Kandhari’s Sister Midnight is a radical beast. It is provocative and outlandish, hilarious and macabre. It is intimately accessible and formidably alienating; it is a dark comedy where the depth of darkness constantly squirms with the possibility of humour. Kandhari’s directorial feature is as much a clutter-breaker as it is a freewheeling venture, making up its mind on the go about what to do with itself after having broken the clutter. Surreal and odd, Sister Midnight is a frighteningly original shape-shifting film that cautiously evades meaning to avoid making sense. One would be tempted to brand it as subversive, but Kandhari’s debut is more defiant in its energy, restive in spirit and endearing at its core. The filmmaker suffuses each frame with sprinting chaos where the refusal to conform takes over everything else, outlining in the process a distinct feminine existence in its absence of coherence.

Even though it is widely known, I don’t think enough gets written about how much of a nightmare it is to watch a film in its ‘purest’ form in India. One can overlook the overzealous censors that infantilise the audience with humongous smoking warnings, even for films rated ‘A’, desecrating the work of any self-respecting filmmaker. Along with that, most ambitious films play in sparsely-populated theatres. The screening for Karan Kandhari’s Sister Midnight that I attended in Bengaluru had about a dozen audience members. I have a feeling I would’ve enjoyed the film more if I’d seen it in a packed theatre because it has many visual gags, and most of them are spot on. Also, muted cuss words can feel like sensory speed bumps even if one can decipher them by reading the lip movement. I wondered how the British-Indian director reacted to the alterations? But hey, at least the film released, unlike Sandhya Suri’s Santosh (2024).

Sister Midnight is unlike anything I’ve seen before. I mean that in both a good way and bad way. It’s the kind of droll, deadpan, disorienting and daringly designed film where the camera is as socially awkward as the characters it films — like an anachronistic Wes Anderson video trapped by the audiovisual rhythms of Mumbai. People face the lens and speak like humanoids; absurd things happen in strikingly staged night-time incidents; the city behaves like a grainy and reluctant painting; everyone acts wild and unpredictable. It’s also the cinematic equivalent of an offbeat person who hides their vulnerability behind a barrage of provocative cues. If we question them for not staying with an emotion longer than a few seconds, they counter-question us for being so uptight. The joke is supposed to be those who find the film increasingly bizarre and difficult to watch. For better or worse, its relationship with the average viewer is part of its conceit.

Writer-director Karan Kandhari’s mischievous and daring feature debut 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.

Sister Midnight, which premiered at Cannes in 2024, and is out in limited release this week in India, is a bizarro-serio-comedy like no other. Radhika Apte plays Uma, a newly-wed on a train heading into Mumbai. The vastness of the city is reduced to a ramshackle kholi that is as alien to her as the man she is married to: Gopal (Ashok Pathak). He is as uncomfortable as she is, when it comes to holding out any kind of comfort or consummation. UK-based British-Indian director Karan Kandhari uses his varied music video experience to layer his debut feature with sounds drawn from around the world. It takes a bit getting used to, and feels all over the place at first, but then you realise how the discordance matches the movie, which is all about jangled people trying to find their rhythm.