Sister Midnight is a Mumbai-set black comedy following Uma (Radhika Apte), a headstrong woman fresh from the sticks who’s chafing at her arranged marriage to a distant man. As she grapples with isolation and circumscribed domesticity, Uma’s frustrations manifest in ways both macabre and surreal (not to mention darkly funny), including sucking blood and galavanting with a gaggle of stop-motion goats.
Boasting striking compositions (with every shot evocatively storyboarded), rich colors, and the first score composed by Interpol frontman Paul Banks, writer-director Karan Kandhari’s feature debut premiered at last year’s Cannes Film Festival in Directors’ Fortnight and was nominated for outstanding debut at the BAFTAs.
It’s a marvelously audacious, utterly sui generis salute to those who defiantly flout tired rules and clash with customs, whether you call it feminism or punk rock; really, they’re two sides of the same rebellious coin, Kandhari points out. “The film is a hymn to being an outsider,” the London-based filmmaker tells Vogue. “I’m attracted to misfits and weirdos and people who don’t fit in society.”
The film was inspired by his first visit to Mumbai 20 years ago. “I was mesmerized by this chaotic city, full of character and contradictions. It possessed me.” He’d always gravitated toward films where specific cities loomed large, like the Hong Kong of Chungking Express and the New York of Taxi Driver. But Mumbai is also a place where he struggled. “I found it very hard to penetrate. A lot of this film is about loneliness, which I experienced the first time I went there,” he explains.
Its story is about operating in the world without a manual, whatever your role: adult, man, woman, husband, wife. “It spun out from this one moment in the traditional setup of an arranged marriage,” Kandhari says. “The very next morning, after the dude has gone to work, what happens? The whole thing unfurled from that.”