There’s a sequence at the beginning of Karan Kandhari’s BAFTA winning black comedy, Sister Midnight, in which the protagonist, Uma, wanders alone around her new Mumbai neighbourhood. It’s her wedding night, she’s just arrived, and her new husband in their arranged marriage has gone straight to sleep in the tiny one-room flat she now has to call home. Silently walking around the dark streets, she comes across a neon bandstand, empty and surrounded by the scattered debris of a festival: plastic cups, cigarette butts. Everyone has gone home. The party is well and truly over.
Uma’s marital frustrations continue, as do her night-wanderings, which lead to a job as a night cleaner in an office building that won’t hire her during the day. The film’s use of light comes into its own here. An elevator glows fluorescent in the gloom, while the moon glares down like a tractor beam, taking on increasing meaning to our gutsy, mop-wielding hero. Uma soon finds out her problems aren’t limited to the socioeconomic but are rather more visceral, and the film begins to stretch both genre and the audience’s patience. But it’s both the staccato pace of the film combined with the tone-perfect central performance of Radhika Apte that keeps pulling things back on track. Frankly, we need more Angry Young Women in cinema, so this is great to see.
Stylistically, there’s more than a nod to the work of Wes Anderson, whose influence is writ large. His use of colour, tracking shots and even stop-motion animation is integrated heavily into this film. Clearly, Kandhari is a fan. But other eras of cinema are present too. Farcical silent movies are evoked as Uma chases her nervous husband around their miniscule home; a slow zoom-out from a crowded train station wouldn’t be out of place in a 1970s thriller, and there is a direct pastiche of Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo.
The film is punctuated by distinctly western music by Howling Wolf, Buddy Holly, The Band and other such Americana alongside Cambodian soul. It was scored by Interpol frontman Paul Banks and the film’s title comes from the Iggy Pop song of the same name. International music was used to effect in last year’s widely acclaimed, All We Imagine As Light, directed by Payal Kapadia, which also featured the wonderful Chhaya Kadam, who appears in Sister Midnight as Uma’s supportive neighbour.
Moments when the film diverges from the constraints of over-wrought cinema know-how come as a relief, such as a scene towards the end of the film shot on brightly sun-drenched deserted waste ground. But despite the sometimes contrived stylistic references, not a single shot is wasted and it’s a strong directorial debut from a filmmaker working through styles in a quest to find his own. Rose Baker
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Belfast: Queen’s Film Theatre (QFT) from Friday, March 14, 2025.
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Dublin: Irish Film Institute (IFI) from Friday, March 14, 2025.
dir. Karan Kandhari, UK/Sweden/India, 107mins
