‘Sister Midnight' Review: The Feminine Mystique, but Make It Macabre
Malaise turns macabre in 'Sister Midnight,' a shape-shifting tale of an arranged marriage gone awry. The film, written and directed with thrilling originality by Karan Kandhari, is set mostly in the slums of Mumbai and follows a sullen housewife named Uma (Radhika Apte), whose lack of fulfillment manifests as a dark, voracious hunger.
Uma is distressed by almost every facet of her new domestic life, but her first agony arrives in the film's opening minutes after her withdrawn husband, Gopal (Ashok Pathak), leaves her in their single-room home without cash for groceries. She's lonely, hungry and bored, and the days that follow offer little to relieve the tedium. As time wears on, her misery gives way to flulike symptoms that send her to bed with fatigue, vomiting and chills.
This is when the film takes a turn for the paranormal, with Uma's affliction — and its nastier nighttime expressions — serving as a metaphor for her discontents. If the writer Betty Friedan once abstracted the horrors of being a housewife as 'the problem that has no name,' 'Sister Midnight' calls the horrors just that, and then gives them the genre hallmarks to match.
In his first feature, Kandhari makes use of morbid humor and expressive imagery, including stop-motion effects. He rarely relies on dialogue and favors a fuzzier plot, which leaves the story with a shapeless and sometimes confusing midsection. Eventually, a repetitive pattern sets in that can feel stifling. But if it's troubling to us, just imagine how Uma feels.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Washington Post
2 days ago
- Washington Post
Diary of a mad Mumbai housewife
Startling, dreamlike, frustrating, funny — Karan Kandhari's debut feature, 'Sister Midnight,' is an absolute original. Which doesn't mean this diary of a mad Mumbai newlywed doesn't have its antecedents and influences. In interviews, the British Indian director has spoken of his love for Buster Keaton and Jacques Tati, and the film's careful framing of explosively reactive slapstick evokes both classic film comedy and the deadpan precision of Wes Anderson. Yet there are darker sources that take 'Sister Midnight' in disturbing, elliptical directions reminiscent of Roman Polanski's 'Repulsion' and Ana Lily Amirpour's 'A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night.'
Yahoo
01-06-2025
- Yahoo
‘Friendship' Rocks As Tim Robinson, Paul Rudd Bromance Expands
Audiences are really latching onto A24's Friendship, buoying it to no. 7 at the domestic box office on just 60 screens with a $1.4 million weekend ($23k per screen average) and a $2+ million cume. The film by Andrew DeYoung debuted on six screens last week with a top limited opening and can now boast a hugely successful expansion. The R-rated comedy stars comedian Tim Robinson as suburban dad Craig whose life is turned upside down by the arrival of a new neighbor (Paul Rudd). More from Deadline 'Friendship' Moves To Top Ten Markets, Star Tim Robinson's Hometown Detroit; 'Sister Midnight', 'The Old Woman With The Knife' - Specialty Preview 'Friendship' Skyrockets To Top Limited Opening Of 2025 For Tim Robinson, Paul Rudd Comedy - Specialty Box Office 'Friendship' Comedy Bromance With Tim Robinson, Paul Rudd Selling Tickets And Hats - Specialty Preview Certified Fresh RT (89% with critics, 83% audience score) and backed by excellent exit polls, the bromance is generating tremendous word-of-mouth. Expands to a limited nationwide release over Memorial Day weekend as it settles into a long theatrical run throughout the summer. Indie grosses can trickle in through early in the week, will update with any new numbers. Kani Releasing releases Yoko Yamanaka's Desert of Namibia exclusively at Metrograph in New York to sold-out screenings, with an estimated opening weekend box office of $4.5k. Expands to LA next week with an exclusive engagement at Laemmle Theatres, with director Q&As hosted by fellow filmmakers India Donaldson (Good One) and Winnie Cheung (Residency). She will screen her debut film Aniko at American Cinematheque May 22, hosted by Carson Lund (Eephus). Logline: mercurial 21-year-old Kana (Yuumi Kawai), a hair-removal technician at a salon in Tokyo, who bristles against the beauty expectations placed on women her age. Her erratic moods and default to self-destruct impacts all of her relationships as moments of levity erupt into violence and optimism simmers to despair. And s Saturday transmission of Strauss's Salome from Fathom grossed $622.5k in North America at about 800 cinema screens. Conducted by the Met's Jeanette Lerman-Neubauer Music Director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, and starring soprano Elza van den Heever and baritone Peter Mattei, the title had the seventh highest per-screen average (with only one screening) of all filmed content screenings across North America and was ranked sixth in North America Saturday. Encore screenings in U.S on May 21. An estimated 31,500 people saw Salome live (with an additional $700k across more than 800 screens internationally). Fathom's presentation of Kiki's Delivery Service as part of its Studio Ghibli Fest grossed $1+ million on 1,062 screens giving the rerelease a no. 9 spot. Sideshow/Janus Films' release of Jia Zhangke's Caught By The Tides grossed an estimated $45.3k on 16 screens for a week 2 cume of $ Best of Deadline Sean 'Diddy' Combs Sex-Trafficking Trial Updates: Cassie Ventura's Testimony, $10M Hotel Settlement, Drugs, Violence, & The Feds 'Nine Perfect Strangers' Season 2 Release Schedule: When Do New Episodes Come Out? Everything We Know About Ari Aster's 'Eddington' So Far
Los Angeles Times
24-05-2025
- Los Angeles Times
In ‘Sister Midnight,' an unhappy housewife escapes into a city's rhythms
A gritty, rock-inflected comedy using the nocturnal peculiarities of Mumbai slum life as a fertile (if at times fetid) palette, British-raised Karan Kandhari's 'Sister Midnight,' about a restless young housewife's urban malaise, easily holds your attention for long stretches when seemingly little happens, but everything feels charged. Don't mistake this stylish feature debut for a misery wallow, however, or some poetic character study. It's tantalizingly oddball and indelicate: a combined daymare and night odyssey that scratches until a feral hidden strength is revealed in the misfit main character, captivatingly played by Indian star Radhika Apte. Though the movie ultimately can't square its episodic unpredictability with the bubbling feminist-outlaw energy at its core — not to mention the comic-book twist that shakes it all up halfway through — that's less a bug than a feature. Like a movie DJ, Kandhari is flexing a pulpy mood of big-city dislocation, building a trippy, jarring and blackly funny experience out of a city's stray colors, sounds and personalities. Arriving at their one-room hovel in the dead of night, arranged-marriage newlyweds and rural transplants Uma (Apte) and Gopal (Ashok Pathak) look more like thrown-together prison cellmates adjusting to a warden's rules than a romantic couple embracing a future together. We glean that this was a match of undesirables: the timid, sexless guy no girl wanted and the girl too outspoken to be paired. But here they are, having to make do. Gopal at least has a job to go to, from which he often comes home hammered after drinks with colleagues. Uma, left behind in the solitude of a shack that only allows one shaft of window light, is quick to profanely protest the joyless, intimacy-challenged rut they've entered. Alternating between angry and exhausted, she bristles at acclimating to the domesticity that her prickly neighbor wives treat like a club handshake. Before long, Uma's taste for cigarettes under the moonlight turns into regular solo walks at all hours. An impulsive journey to a coastal part of town hours away leads to her taking a cleaning job in an office building (and a friendship with a glumly simpatico elevator operator). Suddenly, she's brandishing a mop and pail everywhere like a rootless knight without a quest or a horse. Then there's a cryptic street encounter with a goat and things get even weirder. But also, somehow, more validating. Kandhari, with his hypnotic Wes Anderson-by-way-of-David Lynch widescreen framing and deliberate tracking shots, seems more concerned with capturing something liminal in Uma's alternative existence, as if the city were just weird and oppressive enough to tease out any transformation that was already lying dormant. (By the time the movie introduces stop-motion creatures roaming the streets, you've been primed to think, 'Sure, why not?') A mischievously off-the-wall exercise like 'Sister Midnight' (which eventually embraces some gnarlier elements) needs a certain steam to keep up its deadpan wildness. Kandhari is blessed in that regard with an active visual curiosity about his cracked fable's punk potential, helped by Sverre Sørdal's humid cinematography and a game lead in Apte, whose middle-finger energy is sometimes hilariously offset by a wonderful silent-film-star haplessness. One wishes it all held together a little more, instead of laying seeds that tend to sprout vibes and distractions instead of an illuminating cohesiveness. Kandhari will too often keep Uma in cartoon rebel-goddess mode, needle-dropping another classic rock cut as if daring us to accept Motorhead or Buddy Holly as the only viable soundtrack for what's going on. But those elements are a kick, too. Of course, the title 'Sister Midnight' is an Iggy Pop staple. 'What can I do about my dreams?' it growls, an apt lyric for the singularly inventive and unmanageable fever of a movie that shares its name.
