Sister Midnight

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.