An Indian girl walks home alone at night in Sister Midnight, an exuberant Cannes premiere that riffs on cinematic vampire folklore, gory slasher movie tropes, and even vintage Samurai films, but without fully committing to any fixed genre. Featuring a compelling kick-ass heroine desperate to break away from her crushingly narrow life choices, writer-director Karan Kandhari’s dark comedy thriller makes some timely feminist points, but also works on its own terms as a boldly weird, wildly unpredictable ride. Despite erratic pacing and some jarring tonal swerves, it should find a healthy audience after Cannes thanks to its cultish genre credentials, strong visual style and full-blooded lead performance from rising Bollywood star Radhika Apte.
A Kuwait-born, London-based film-maker and multimedia artist of Indian heritage, Kandhari first began to conceived this offbeat yarn on a trip to Mumbai a decade ago. With just one previous feature to his name, his directing CV mostly consists of shorts and music videos. Which helps explain the splashy visuals and pop-heavy soundtrack of Sister Midnight, which boasts an overstuffed Tarantino-ish jukebox selection including Bob Dylan and The Band, heavy rockers Motorhead, country singer Mary Robbins and many more. The film’s title, borrowed from a vintage Iggy Pop song, also chimes with its heroine’s punky spirit.
A moon-faced, saucer-eyed, hilariously deadpan presence on screen, Apte stars as Uma, young woman nervously heading to Mumbai to begin an arranged marriage to a man she has barely even met, the well-meaning but shy, heavy-drinking Gopal (Ashok Pathak). Stuck in a single-room shack with a husband who is either literally or emotionally absent all day, her anger and frustration soon begin to boil over.
“Why can’t you just be a person, like the other people?” pleads Gopal, who is sympathetically presented here as more weak-willed, clueless sap than patriarchal bully. Indeed, Uma initially attempts to play the dutiful wife role, taking her cue from her amusingly cynical neighbour. But a dead-end life in a cramped domestic prison cell very soon drives the hot-tempered, potty-mouthed newlywed to despair, and she heads out into the big city seeking wider horizons.
Uma’s escape plan begins innocently enough, with a mundane after-hours cleaning job and a flamboyant gang of transgender friends, bonded by their shared outsider status. But events take a more macabre turn following a fraught family wedding. Sister Midnight then becomes a twist-heavy nocturama which includes the drinking of animal blood, an accidental death, the grisly business of disposing of a chopped-up corpse, a bizarre sojourn in a spiritual commune, and more. The zig-zagging plot becomes little ungainly here, but Kandhari is clearly not aiming for a conventional narrative arc, more a delirious crescendo of increasingly weird episodes.
Even at its most overheated, Sister Midnight is prevented from careering off the rails completely by dextrous editing, handsome visuals, strong performances and bruisingly dark humour. The long opening section, which plays entirely without dialogue, is a reassuring early sign that Kandhari has an imaginative and original eye. Crucially, Apte is magnetic as a downtrodden housewife with a feral beast lurking inside her, or perhaps the other way around. Fighting back against sexist limitations and stifling social conventions, she’s as mad and hell, and she’s not going to take it any more.
Director, screenwriter: Karan Kandhari
Cast: Radhika Apte, Ashok Pathak, Chhaya Kadam, Smita Tambe, Navya Sawant
World sales: Protagonist Pictures
Cinematography: Sverre Sørdal
Editing: Napoleon Stratogiannakis
Production design: Shruti Gupte
Music: Paul Banks
Producers: Alastair Clark, Anna Griffin, Alan McAlex
Production companies: Wellington Films (UK), Griffin Pictures (UK)
Venue: Cannes film festvial (Directors’ Fortnight)
In Hindi, English
110 mins
