Filled with the rhythm of a rock song and the visual language of a nightmare, Karan Kandhari’s Sister Midnight feels like the mix spun from a DJ at the height of a late-night party, leaving their mark on the material through every indulgence and creative flourish. Perhaps expectedly, it’s also not entirely cohesive, with a final act that gradually loses its focus in a bout of drunken overindulgence. Still, the thrills that come before make this a journey well worth going on.
Whatever type of party Kandhari is DJing at, it certainly isn’t a wedding. The conundrum at the core of his film — and the source of much of its comedy and all of its horror — lies in a painfully stilted marriage between Uma (Radhika Apte) and Gopal (Ashok Pathak), an arranged couple who have freshly arrived at their unremarkable home in Mumbai, a one-room shack squeezed between other residents. Gopal, a timid man insecure about his lack of sexual experience, spends his work nights out drinking with co-workers and his off hours masturbating while watching TV, keeping an emotional and often physical distance from his wife at all times. Naturally, this drives Uma insane, a notion that appears to be rhetorical at the film’s beginning and becomes more disturbingly manifest as it goes on.
Indeed, it’s hard not to sympathize with Uma, as Radhika Apte’s impeccable control over her emotions telegraphs the frustration in every furrowed brow and lackadaisical longing in each thousand-yard stare. New to the metropolis of over 20 million, she is expected to settle into the housewife routine, for which she is as unprepared as she is utterly disinterested. Though there are occasional moments of respite and levity, such as when neighbor Sheetal (Chhaya Kadam) offers cooking advice for transforming the plainest dishes into something more filling, Uma’s newfound existence is overwhelmingly isolating, and the insults and questions she hurls at her husband do little to add passion to their love life.
In her desperation for connection, which presents itself physically as a mysterious bout of illness, Uma turns toward the urban jungle, not unlike Martin Scorsese’s Travis Bickle, another wandering loner of cinema whom she pays homage to on the film’s poster. Instead of driving taxis, Uma elects to become a night shift janitor, which lends her time to long walks under the moonlight, with a cigarette in her mouth, and a mop and bucket in tow. While the naturally-lit daytime scenes, in which the bright colors of greenery amidst urban spaces contrast the dark shadows on Uma, at night this is inverted, wherein Uma’s silhouetted figure journeys underneath a pale blue sky, seemingly more at home than ever before. It’s an atmosphere that at times brings to mind the cityscapes seen in the works of Jim Jarmusch and Michael Mann, and the soundtrack, which threads together tunes as disparate as Cambodian soul sounds and covers of Iggy Pop and The Band, further invite those comparisons.
But this is also a lively film, with plenty of deadpan humor and absurd iconography to match its grimmer backdrop. There are birds and goats, animals who are first cast as unfortunate victims of the increasingly questionable ways in which Uma lets go of her inhibitions, but are later resurrected as stop-motion creatures of the night, beings that exist between life and death, between fact and fiction. And as the film approaches its finale, Uma herself has also gone from ordinary drifter to bona fide creature of the night. This tonal whiplash that comes from embracing the supernatural is undoubtedly jarring, and is ultimately more baffling than it is satisfying. But flights of fancy are to be expected within a dream, and after all the time spent watching Apte’s displays of pain, one is reasonably inclined to just drift away with Uma.
DIRECTOR: Karan Kandhari; CAST: Radhika Apte, Ashok Pathak, Chhaya Kadam, Smita Tambe; DISTRIBUTOR: Magnet Releasing; IN THEATERS: May 16; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 50 min.
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