'Sister Midnight' Movie Review: Radhika Apte Reframes Implosion as an Artform

Director: Karan Kandhari

Writer: Karan Kandhari

Cast: Radhika Apte, Ashok Pathak, Chhaya Kadam, Smita Tambe

Language: Hindi

Sister Midnight is unlike anything I’ve seen before. I mean that in both a good way and bad way. It’s the kind of droll, deadpan, disorienting and daringly designed film where the camera is as socially awkward as the characters it films — like an anachronistic Wes Anderson video trapped by the audiovisual rhythms of Mumbai. People face the lens and speak like humanoids; absurd things happen in strikingly staged night-time incidents; the city behaves like a grainy and reluctant painting; everyone acts wild and unpredictable. It’s also the cinematic equivalent of an offbeat person who hides their vulnerability behind a barrage of provocative cues. If we question them for not staying with an emotion longer than a few seconds, they counter-question us for being so uptight. The joke is supposed to be those who find the film increasingly bizarre and difficult to watch. For better or worse, its relationship with the average viewer is part of its conceit.

Sister Midnight untells the story of Uma (Radhika Apte), a housewife who mentally and physically unravels while wading through an arranged marriage. The film opens with her moving to a tiny roadside kholi in Mumbai with Gopal (Ashok Pathak), a husband as detached as the city that swallows her. She cannot cook or manage the house; he comes home drunk and sleeps next to her like a stranger. When she strips and offers her hand as an amorous invitation, he offers her a handshake instead. Every time he speaks, she snaps at him like an urban lady scoffing at the masculinity of a working-class striver. They’re like comic figures stuck in a simmering tragedy. The only thing they know how to share is the occasional cigarette.

Uma isn’t ordinary, but the world is rigged to convince her that she’s abnormal rather than extraordinary. She finds a job as a sweeper at a shipping firm to kill time, but that’s not the only killing she does. Uma’s loneliness is not the sort that recedes — it’s a strange and violent isolation that, if not treated, mutates into a feral condition. The young woman soon finds herself roaming the streets at night, crawling up trees, feasting on birdbrains (yes) and rodent heads, preserving their decapitated corpses in a box under their bed, and projectile-vomiting any vegetable she eats. Needless to mention, Gopal is in for the shock of his patriarchal life.

I like how, at some point, the film threatens to become an oddball love story. Uma learns to cook from her neighbour (Chhaya Kadam), forces her husband to take her out on Sundays, and even comes clean about her weird behaviour before finally having sex with him. Their incompatibility nearly fades. This perception is further fed by the fact that Gopal isn’t your garden-variety toxic spouse; he is shy, gentle, confused and in awe of Uma’s microaggressions. He is not equipped to understand her, yet even his neglect looks a bit endearing. But Sister Midnight simply teases our notions of how small-town marriages (Laapataa Ladies, ahem) tend to unfold on screen. In the end, Uma’s body literally rebels against her decision to conform and settle for a narrative we’re so used to consuming.

Loneliness is usually the price of individualism, but here, individualism becomes the currency of loneliness. Every subsequent night of suffering suggests that Uma isn’t naturally supposed to be in Mumbai: repressed, shrinking, halved, unseen. In a way, the film itself sets out to extract her from the confines of conventional storytelling. It’s like watching a fraught man turn into a werewolf or vampire after being bitten, except it’s a woman turning into a ‘monster’ for losing herself. This thing has no obvious face — canine instincts, feline motives — as if to suggest that even the supernatural and ‘empowered’ forms of womanhood are denied an identity. She looks like Uma but feels like a primal being in search of a name. The eclectic soundtrack — an original fusion of Asian and Western needle-drop-coded tunes — feeds this dissonance of identity; she doesn’t know what she is, people don’t know what she is, so even the music doesn’t know who she is.

Radhika Apte is no longer as prolific as she used to be, but in Uma, she somehow reframes disjointedness and unfamiliarity as a superpower. It’s a role to die for, and she performs it without inhibition and reference points. In doing so, she creates an inexplicable character that — like the film itself — makes sense only after we’ve watched her. There are points when it seems as if she’s just hurling an assortment of random moods. In real time, it feels like Apte’s almost flaunting her talent and winging the screenplay as she goes. Once it’s over, however, an unfilmable journey to ‘freedom’ emerges. It’s a go-girl quest that could’ve been depicted in many mainstream ways, but Sister Midnight forces it to stay undetectable. It’s frustrating and clumsy in the moment, but meaningful in hindsight: an artistic version of postcoital clarity.

Apte’s acting is so free-styled that the protagonist’s transformation, too, acquires the grammar of rebellion. Being a divorcee, Uma is aware that society views her through the lens of ill-informed superstitions and stigmas. They see her as a defective and mythical creature already. So, almost as a middle finger to this reductive gaze, Uma’s body adopts all the rumoured ‘evils’ of an outcast. It derives its form from all the little fictions society inflicts upon those who resist the norm; those who carry the label of “failed marriage” when they actually succeed in preserving a love for themselves. With a broom as a cleaner, she resembles a witch — even resorting to some ritualistic gore during her descent. With her new appetite for meat and blood, she becomes the most heightened version of that impure ‘non-veg’ lady that people imagine she is. With her newfound agility and independence, she becomes the deranged and shameless demon that everyone tells tales about.

It’s like she wickedly and consciously turns into all the cliches that a male-dominated culture warns themselves about. She morphs into the very stereotype that narrow-minded parents and elders make fables about. It’s a thin line between ridicule and reverence; at one point, a cop and a mob worship her out of fear when she unwittingly strikes a Goddess-like pose. She mines the fact that she’s no longer human in their eyes. Most of all, with her newfound courage to respect her own needs, she becomes a woman who doesn’t care what people think. This alone shapes the howls — of grief and of guffawing — in Sister Midnight. It’s the cinema of contradiction, in all its big-swing glory and dark self-indulgence. Criticising it, after all, is a confession of complicity.