Sis­ter Mid­night review – a droll, strange, cool freak of a film

“What do nor­mal peo­ple do on a Sun­day?”, asks Uma (Rad­hi­ka Apte), some way into writer/​director Karan Kandhari’s Sis­ter Mid­night. ​“We’re not nor­mal peo­ple,” her hus­band Gopal (Ashok Pathak) replies. Gopal is not wrong. For even though the film opens with the cou­ple trav­el­ling by train from that most con­ven­tion­al of Indi­an prac­tices, an arranged mar­riage, once they reach Gopal’s shack, he pass­es out, even though Uma under­stands, and is will­ing to per­form, her con­ju­gal duties.

Uma is clue­less, though, on how to pre­pare food or keep house while Gopal is at work, and although the film starts as a silent dead­pan com­e­dy with no dia­logue at all, once Uma has opened her mouth, she turns out to be dis­arm­ing­ly direct and crude. With Gopal typ­i­cal­ly return­ing home late and drunk, and the mar­riage remain­ing uncon­sum­mat­ed, bored Uma turns to her neigh­bour Shee­tal (Chhaya Kadam) for com­pa­ny and basic cook­ing lessons, and even­tu­al­ly takes a job as a clean­er in a trav­el agent’s miles away, where she some­times works nights. The new­ly­weds bare­ly see one anoth­er, set­ting the oth­er neigh­bours gossiping.

Even­tu­al­ly, and grad­u­al­ly, Uma’s oth­er­ness will express itself through ele­ments of genre that will turn those same neigh­bours into a torch-bear­ing mob straight out of a clas­sic Uni­ver­sal hor­ror film. There are oth­er movie ref­er­ences. At one point a mono­chrome jidaige­ki show­ing on an old tea­house tele­vi­sion (and par­o­dy­ing The Sev­en Samu­rai) takes over the screen, with its out­cast rōnin a clear coun­ter­part to Uma (who will soon imi­tate his top­knot). And as Uma stag­gers exhaust­ed down a lone­ly road, a theme from Paris Texas plays. Yet it is most­ly with hor­ror that Sis­ter Mid­night hilar­i­ous­ly flirts, intro­duc­ing, with­out ever ful­ly pur­su­ing or even explain­ing, aspects of the vam­pire, witch and chedipe.

Mean­while, with­out real­ly try­ing, Uma sur­rounds her­self with peo­ple who are as blithe­ly mar­gin­alised as her­self: Adi­ti (Navya Sawant) and her gang of trans sex work­ers, or the lift oper­a­tor at the trav­el agent’s who shares Uma’s love of night and qui­et, or the hin­du priest who appears out of nowhere to assist in a cre­ma­tion cer­e­mo­ny, or the female Bud­dhist monks who do not believe in God. For in Sis­ter Mid­night, it is the odd­ball who rules, and Uma, sur­round­ed by flut­ter­ing (zom­bie) birds – not to men­tion bleat­ing goats – is like a weirdo Dis­ney princess, and queen of the misfits.

Play­ing like a Jar­musch – or Amir­pour – joint, Sis­ter Mid­night is a droll, strange, cool freak of a film, nev­er quite fin­ish­ing its own sen­tences or fol­low­ing through on nar­ra­tive expec­ta­tion. Like the point­less, frus­trat­ing 13-hour week­end excur­sion that Uma and Gopal take to the beach only to have no time before they need to catch the last bus back, this film is a round trip going nowhere, end­ing, as it begins, on a train under a full moon. Yet the jour­ney is the thing, and its hero­ine is now a dif­fer­ent per­son, hav­ing under­gone a trans­for­ma­tion from a man’s bride into some­one more inde­pen­dent and for­mi­da­ble – indeed bet­ter than a nor­mal person.