Sister Midnight: Strange Appetites
by Nirica S.
How do I talk about Sister Midnight while telling you as little as possible about Sister Midnight? I ask this not just because it’s the kind of movie that you should absolutely go into knowing as little as possible, but because it’s so delightfully idiosyncratic that I doubt words will do it justice. Once you get on its distinctly weird wavelength, Sister Midnight is a wholly unique and unexpected film, anchored by a standout performance from Radhika Apte.
British-Indian filmmaker Karan Kandhari’s directorial debut introduces us to a young couple, Uma (Radhika Apte) and Gopal (Ashok Pathak), newly wed in a semi-arranged marriage. But married life is not what Uma expected: She spends her days staring at the wall of their one-room house, bored out of her mind, and her brief interactions with her husband are limited to when he comes home from work too drunk to stand up. Entirely unsuited to domestic life, Uma gets herself a job working the night shift as a cleaner at an office at the other end of the city. She meets and befriends others on her frequency, all, like her, occupying the fringes of society: the woman next door, Sheetal (played by Chhaya Kadam, as delightful here as in the wildly popular All We Imagine as Light and Laapataa Ladies), with whom she wanders the city listlessly; a group of trans women on her long walk home; the lift operator at work. And slowly, as the nights pass, Uma begins to succumb to strange impulses.
From here on out I can comfortably say there was not one moment where I felt confident I knew where the film was going. Sister Midnight constantly flirts with, subverts, and rejects genres and tropes. Often, it is laugh-out-loud funny, even goofy; at other times, it invokes well-worn horror tropes and archetypes and turns them on their head. (There is also, dare I say it, an almost-sweet romance.) Through it all it maintains a feeling of wackiness, like we’re in some bizarre alternate universe. Some viewers may feel unsatisfied with its apparent lack of interest in offering explanations, or a coherent, A-to-B plot. But it’s refreshing to see a film refuse to be clearly legible, to take its audience seriously and allow us to draw our own conclusions. Instead of creating and fleshing out a concrete mythology, it relies on atmosphere—the vivid emptiness of a city at nighttime, the blue glow of a lift illuminating a lonely rooftop—and on Radhika Apte’s performance to propel us forward. And Apte is up to the task: She brings Uma, in all her boredom, brashness, and ferality to life. As Uma, she is formidable and unpredictable—not just in terms of her growing appetite, but also in how she flat-out refuses to adapt to a world that demands things of her that she does not want to give.
Aside from its references to well-worn tropes, there’s also much to remind viewers of other art here. The editing style (and the frequent appearance of stop motion creatures) often made me think of Wes Anderson, Uma catches a film that recalls Seven Samurai on TV, and at one point, a theme from Paris, Texas plays. A key scene featuring a deus ex machina is inspired by Bob Dylan’s “Drifter’s Escape,” and the film’s title itself comes from an Iggy Pop song. But instead of coming across as a series of references and homages to other work, the film actually works to achieve what is best about those references. Instead of imitating other people’s styles or mythologies, Sister Midnight treats them as inspiration. What emerges is a style and a sensibility that feel as fresh and original as what makes the greats great in the first place.
It might be tempting to read metaphors into this film. Is it about the boredom of an arranged marriage, or of patriarchy? The boredom of marriage in general? Is the postponement of the consummation of their marriage the reason Uma develops a stranger appetite? Is she a vampire? A witch? Neither? Both? Is this a horror movie, a comedy, a romance? What’s fun about Sister Midnight is it doesn’t attempt to map neatly onto anything: not a metaphor, a genre, or a mythology. Instead, like Uma, it’s entirely unique—a much wilder, more unpredictable beast.