Sister Midnight: a lush, hallucinatory journey through an arranged marriage
Karan Kandhari’s wild debut feature about a newly married Mumbai woman whose life takes a surreal turn when she is bitten by a mosquito is bursting with cinephilic enthusiasm, but at times puts the images before its ideas.
What does it say about India that so many recent films from the subcontinent feature key scenes set on trains? Kiran Rao’s charming comedy Laapataa Ladies (2023) begins with a case of mistaken identity in the carriage of a sleeper train; almost all of Nikhil Nagesh Bhat’s visceral thriller Kill (2023) is set on board a high-speed locomotive; and the Mumbai metro is a recurring location in last year’s Grand Prix winner at Cannes, All We Imagine as Light. It’s easy to see the appeal of the train for Indian filmmakers: it’s a symbol of modernity and mobility that can be handily counterposed against the strictures of tradition and social stasis.
So it proves in Karan Kandhari’s Sister Midnight, which opens with a slow tracking shot inside a train carriage that culminates in the profile view of a newly-wed in a bridal veil. Her sleeping husband is slouched so low he’s practically on the floor – a picture of lethargy next to his alert, watchful wife. The particulars of their union are left unspecified, but it seems to have been made under familial pressure: it’s hard to imagine the brash, outspoken Uma (Radhika Apte) wanting to settle down with anyone, least of all the sad sack Gopal (Ashok Pathak), who spends the first few weekends of their marriage getting blind drunk on his own.
The early scenes, largely set in the couple’s dark, poky single room in Mumbai, ripple with nervous energy; Sverre Sørdal’s whip pans and punchy editing by Napoleon Stratogiannakis get across the psychic dislocation of the initial stages of any arranged marriage. For the first six minutes there’s no dialogue at all, a choice that plays up the conjugal awkwardness while heralding Kandhari’s reliance on the camera to do the talking. But this is no systematic critique of arranged marriage or patriarchy. Sister Midnight is an attempt, first and foremost, to channel its protagonist’s wild sensibilities, which coexist with her implacable self-possession.
There’s not much of a plot: Uma takes up a job as a cleaner at a shipping company; the couple’s marriage seems to grow stronger, until suddenly it doesn’t; and at some point – around the time Uma gets bitten by a mosquito – the movie enters hallucinatory territory, complete with stop-motion animals. (Most of the film’s mystical elements play out in a strictly urban setting, albeit one that is devoid of the bustle of the real Mumbai.)
Some critics have labelled the film ‘punkish’, perhaps taking their cue from the title’s nod to Iggy Pop and the presence of his songs on the soundtrack, but this plays down the nature of the movie’s visual pleasures: the rich colours and deep shadows, which, combined with the careful framing and the laconic characters, recall Aki Kaurismäki at his most painterly.
The film also evokes Roy Andersson, with its static shots of people looking somehow both at home and out of place; Wes Anderson, with its immaculately framed tableaux accompanied by classic pop songs; and even 1960s chanbara movies, in a film-within-a-film that appears for no particular reason besides a surfeit of cinephilic enthusiasm on Kandhari’s part. Shot on 35mm Kodak stock with Panavision cameras, Sister Midnight is consistently lush; any number of its shots look good enough to hang on your wall.
Increasingly, though, Kandhari’s intoxication with picture-making comes at the expense of thinking the film’s ideas through fully or making them stick. No one scene leaves a killer impression, while certain elements seem glaringly superficial: a group of hijras – India’s officially recognised third gender – crop up every so often, but their presence, as in Dev Patel’s Monkey Man (2024), is largely talismanic. And though the presence of so many vintage Cambodian bangers on the soundtrack is welcome, in the final stretch the movie surrenders some of its more distinctive energy to the easier pleasures of pairing groovy songs with cool visuals.
Still, Kandhari has a sharp eye for absurdity. Uma repeatedly fields the envious question “What whitening cream are you using?” even as it’s clear her pallor is caused by her increasingly frazzled physical state. And a subtle shot of our heroine as a kind of ‘domestic goddess’ – mop in one hand, bucket in the other – sums up the position of many women in Indian societies: both subjugated and revered. How to sum up Kandhari’s combination of visual inventiveness and wit? His admirers might call it a lust for life.
► Sister Midnight is in UK cinemas 14 March.