The Nutty, Colorful, and Moving Sister Midnight Is Well Worth Seeing

Karan Kandhari’s colorful and deeply odd Sister Midnight, about the frustrations of a young woman in a working-class corner of Mumbai, is one of those movies that starts over here and ends waaay over there. But the film comes by its tonal shifts and narrative changes honestly — its twists are organic and rooted in character — which is quite an accomplishment for a feature directing debut. After a premiere at Cannes last year, the movie is currently screening in New York, and it expands to Los Angeles and elsewhere starting this week. Imaginatively shot, with an eclectic soundtrack that includes classic rock, metal, and Cambodian soul, it’s well worth experiencing on a big screen.

I’m not going to tell you what “waaay over there” entails exactly, but I will tell you what “over here” means. The film begins with a young newlywed couple, Uma (Radhika Apte) and Gopal (Ashok Pathak), arriving by train in the big city, where he’s got a small crowded room waiting for her. They come from the same village — though as Uma briefly explains later, they weren’t exactly longtime sweethearts — and are clearly unsuited for married life, certainly not with each other. Uma doesn’t have a domestic bone in her body, and Gopal seems unable even to undress in front of his wife, let alone have anything resembling carnal relations. They barely speak, and Kandhari presents their interactions with a silent-movie combination of humor and pathos. With wide, insistent eyes, Uma signals her bewilderment at this new world, while Gopal can’t so much as look at her; he’d rather disappear off to have a drink, supposedly with his work pals but possibly just by himself.

These people are alone, in other words, in a city of 21 million. Uma’s efforts to try and forge a relationship with Gopal are frustrated at every turn, and the human furnace of the city outside her door gets to her. The director fills the frame with people and shadows and color as he tracks his protagonist at night down city streets. The film takes place along a small settlement of one-room shops and shacks, and we catch glimpses of these other little worlds throbbing behind those doors and windows, all forbiddingly aglow with life. The press of humanity, its diversity as well as its uniformity, claws at Uma’s consciousness. At one point, she finds herself on a bus filled with women wearing bangles on their arms; the whole vehicle rattles deafeningly as it moves. Kandhari has taken a potentially realist setup and turned it into an act of playful expressionism.

And how. Sister Midnight has almost nothing in common with Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, and yet I was constantly reminded of Taxi Driver, in its formal liveliness as well as its presentation of a character who is alienated from the crowd and yet very much of it. Uma eventually takes a job as a night janitor at a shipping agency, which forces her into more nocturnal wanderings. The film’s later, more unexpected plot developments flirt with genre — they might actually do more than that — but thankfully, the picture remains in the realm of emotion and character, which comes as a huge relief. (And yes, I am deliberately trying not to give away too much, though this movie isn’t really about its twists.)

So many filmmakers nowadays use personal stories and potentially interesting protagonists as mere stepping stones to genre theatrics. That’s gotten worse as the infrastructure of modern indie distribution has been taken over by companies and festivals peddling horror, thriller, and fantasy. Not many people seem to want sincere dramas anymore — or, at least, that’s the impression the industry wants to give us. Luckily, Sister Midnight remains grounded in Uma’s experience, in her isolation from the world around her, in her desire to find a way to repair her marriage, even as things start to change in shocking, absurd, gruesome, and funny ways. She’s headstrong, and an outcast, but she still wants to do what she thinks is the right thing — which renders the film wonderfully unpredictable and more surreal.

This is a promising conceptual approach, but it wouldn’t work without these performances. With relatively little dialogue, Apte gives Uma compelling interiority: We can read multiple emotions into her facial expressions, and we do get the sense that she’s feeling every single one. When she looks on her husband with a combination of contempt and pity as well as love, it’s a truer approximation of how real people regard those around them than we tend to find in most movies. As for Pathak, he takes what could have been a thankless part — the drunk, dim absentee spouse — and brings forth this man’s anxiety and haplessness. The character, for all his dramatic shortcomings, has an inner light. Such depth makes Sister Midnight that much more fascinating and, ultimately, that much more heartbreaking.