Sister Midnight

The look on Uma’s (Radhika Apte) face, as she raises her wedding veil to glimpse the noisy, litter-strewn city she will now call home, is one of abject horror. The failings of the marriage market have long proven artistically fertile but, unlike the Emma Bovarys before her, the combative Uma directly, and repeatedly, berates her bumbling husband, Gopal (Ashok Pathak). Anger radiates off her with such intensity that even her chewing seems defiant. The oppressive shack where she’s confined, absorbing the sounds and smells of Mumbai at all hours, only emphasises the excitement just out of reach. For Uma, sleeping rough (which she does on two occasions) is preferable to being there.

You’ve got to applaud Kandhari for having the guts to crack open his movie and reshape it.

Sister Midnight, writer-director Karan Kandhari’s BAFTA-nominated feature debut,initially plays like a marriage comedy. Much is made of how Gopal strenuously avoids physical intimacy with his bride – at one point shaking her proffered hand when she tries to seduce him – as well as Uma’s withering, foul-mouthed insults. But the film is a lot stranger than that: for better and for worse. The humorous tone deflates when Uma is suddenly taken ill. We wouldn’t dream of spoiling what’s wrong with her, suffice it to say a broken nose, a shoebox of dead birds and a repurposed biscuit tin are involved.

After this mid-movie revelation, Sister Midnight zigzags clumsily between plotlines, dropping some in its haste to pick up new ones. That’s not a problem in and of itself; it’s a welcome respite from the cycle of domestic drudgery that (necessarily!) wears thin in the first half. Where the film falters is in its inconsistent characterisation of Uma, whose behaviour and attitude change so drastically she cannot serve as the guiding force we need her to be when Sister Midnight takes its turn. Still, you’ve got to applaud Kandhari for having the guts to crack open his movie and reshape it into something altogether different.