Sister Midnight Review: Radhika Apte Is Hauntingly Humorous

What do you do when a mosquito bites you? Either you slap it away if you have spidey-sense, or if it’s too late for that, you have to deal with a slight bit of irritation and redness on the skin, maybe, lots of scratching, too. And then you move on.

But this isn’t what Uma, Radhika Apte’s lead character in British-Indian director and screenwriter, Karan Kandhari’s latest film experiences. Strangely, she becomes a little erratic and if you’d humour, blood thirsty for animals.

Rotten Tomatoes

Sister Midnight is a hauntingly humourous blend of dark comedy, absurdity, and body horror that circles around marital realism. Set in Mumbai, the film revolves around Uma, who finds herself caught up in a domestic life that doesn’t rouse her as a newly wedded bride.

She finds the arrange marriage to a man named Gopal, played by the star Ashok Pathak known for his performance in the Amazon Prim Video web series Panchayat, ill-suited.

A visually stunning storytelling that depends more on the what you see on screen than the power of spoken words, Sister Midnight, depicts Uma as a bold, defiantly feral and immensely entertaining portrait of a bride who is rigid in her body movements, wears arm-full of green bangles – a sign of newlyweds- but what the people around her don’t know if that they symbolise lack of freedom.

The humour creeps in every frame that follows the Wes Anderson style of framing giving us a peek into the protagonist’s spiral into madness. It is chaos in surrealistic ways that adds to the fun bits. Moreover, the film’s almost sepia-like, oversaturated color tones, combined with occasional film noir-esque shadowing, effectively capture the vibrant, bustling, and shadowy atmosphere of Mumbai.

IMDB

The lack of dialogue, especially in the beginning, paired with the intense color palette, heightens the feeling of paranoia. The characters’ silence and stillness, in contrast to the chaotic city around them, suggest an early surrender to the suffocating pressures of their environment.

The film firmly captures the struggle of the couple who live in cramped shack- tapping into the class divide that evidently exists in the city of dreams. Without making it overtly about social stratification, the film subtly highlights the sanitary conditions, the long and tiring commute around the city, and the limited availability of medical aid to the couple and the people in the neighbourhood.

Sister Midnight exposes the grotesques expectation of rural life in urban landscapes. The tussle of the working class. Gopal’s dull, drunken and disappointing personality is a catalyst for Uma’s madness. While we are introduced to the characters right into the first 10 minutes of the film marred by silence, the conversations between husband and wife rarely more than cursory, highlighting the extent of Uma’s sense of isolation and otherness in this new chapter of her life.

Moreover, it also gives Apte the space to showcase her remarkable, almost Keatonesque ability to present her comedic capabilities.

Her stoic, yet deadpan expressions add to the physical comedy that dominated the film. In one poignant scene, for instance, when Uma finds herself at Marine Drive, her stoicism kicks in as on one side is a man crying and the other a young girl and next she runs away from ending up in the same position as them.

Moreover, as the story progresses, we see Uma drifting away from her marital life, becoming aversive to her husband. It’s as though the unfamiliarity of her status as a married woman has seeped into her physicality, and she’s ill at ease in her own body.

Later, when she gains confidence and starts to walk around the city, each furious, stomping footstep feels like a reproach to Gopal. The only bodily pleasures that seem appealing to her are blood-drained animals and birds she keeps hunting, but here’s where magical realism kicks in.

The large animals and birds she has been sucking blood out of like juice boxes end up coming back to life. It is a strange mix of madness in the mundane and supernaturality of blood-thirsty vampire.

Don’t think for a minute though, that you’ll be watching the brilliant Radhika Apte turn into a vampire or a Ghoul. The horror of this film comes to the front through the hauntingly humorous incidences that caught you off guard given the camera is stationary.

Be it Chayaa Kadam’s character asking Uma the kind of knife she needs to slaughter or Uma’s interaction with an old woman on the train post her nose injury, or the random conversation with the guy in the elevator, Sister Midnight with its most unexpected and entertaining music – a mix of David Bowie and Howling Wolf to Cambodian romantic music catches you off guard.

Shot on 35mm film, Sister Midnight, that made it’s debut in 2023 in film festivals, in is out in Indian theatres for everyone to enjoy.