‘Sister Midnight' finds a very gory solution to the tedium of young married life

Boston Globe

22-05-2025

In the opening scenes we see the vibrancy and chaos of the city, but Uma (played by Bollywood star Radhika Apte) is isolated from all of it, stuck in a one-room shack waiting to serve her new, buffoonish husband.
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Nearly undone by tedium, Uma begins to rebel in small ways, including getting a job as a cleaning woman at a travel agency in the wealthy part of the city, a world away. Along the way, she begins to change, and while she is initially horrified by her new desires, she eventually accepts herself. The only people she connects with at all are other outsiders — trans sex workers or female Buddhist monks who do not believe in God.
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Director Karan Kandhari.
Magnet Releasing
Several other factors heighten the film's disorienting shift from real to surreal. Kandhari, who is British Indian and was born in Kuwait, began visiting Mumbai when he was young and became 'intoxicated' by the city. 'I visited it many times, like it was a weird addiction,' he says. 'It's a really strange place and I mean that as a compliment. I was always just trying to get my head around the place.'
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But the Mumbai of the movie is neither the one he first visited — 'it's not a period piece' — nor is it exactly contemporary. 'I got stuck in the geography in my head,' he explains, saying he chose to replicate parts of the city that lived in his memory, which have long since vanished in actuality. 'I draw floor plans for things that don't exist and we have to adjust places to fit. So it's a weird mishmash of fragments of things I remember from the '80s or the '90s, or things I've seen from the '70s.'
While 'Sister Midnight' has prompted comparisons to Wes Anderson films, Kandhari dismisses the connection, saying the rich colors and the unusual supporting characters are organic to Mumbai. 'We are probably influenced by the same people, but he's creating an artificial world of weirdness, whereas I see the world as inherently weird and strange and I'm trying to find that in the mundane.'
Additionally, Uma's experiences are not just set to local music — the soundtrack features songs by Howlin' Wolf, Buddy Holly, The Band, The Stooges, and Motorhead. (Kandhari lives and breathes music and has directed videos for artists including Franz Ferdinand.)
Yet the film is also, in an odd way, autobiographical, even though Kandhari's life is nothing like Uma's. He suffers from depression and says the film ponders what it's like to feel different and out of place without knowing how to handle it.
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'I have the sort of brain that questions things like societal norms if they don't make sense,' he says, so while the film is about this arranged marriage it's really about being trapped by societal expectations. 'We should always question the rules — just because something is old doesn't mean it's right.'
Those themes, along with the wildly imaginative script, are what appealed to Apte, who holds together every scene no matter how strange it gets — and it gets quite strange, once some of the creatures she has devoured (birds and goats) come back to life in animated form and are fruitful and multiply.
'I've never read a script like this before. What happens is quite crazy and unexpected,' she says. 'I didn't always know what to think, but it was quite relatable, and I really liked how compassionate Karan was to all his characters.'
Apte was fascinated by the fate that befalls Uma when 'All she does is ask 'Why' about the daily way of life that we blindly follow.'
That trait resonated with Apte, who went to a progressive school in India when they were new and became 'a proper pain in the ass' because she was taught to question everything. 'If somebody says something that doesn't make sense, I'll ask, 'Can you explain why?' That's not me being arrogant. That's just me genuinely trying to understand.'
Still, Apte found the role challenging at first. She studied math in school, so she 'needs logic for everything,' and she loves developing a character's biography to understand why they react to certain things. 'But I knew very little about Uma, whose past was summed up in five lines.'
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Kandhari knew he was asking her to go against her instincts. 'She's a cerebral, intellectual person and analyzes a lot,' Kandhari says. 'My task when we started rehearsals was to get her to de-intellectualize everything, get her rooted in the present moment and impulsively performing with her body. She was a little scared in the first couple of days before it clicked.'
So while Apte would normally figure out what her character was doing before taking action and why she'd take that action, she says the director would tell her, 'I want Uma to get up before you can think of why she gets up.'
'I really struggled at first, but then I stopped asking questions and it felt really right,' she says, adding that the role helped her grow as a person too. (Having a baby also furthered that change, she says. 'I've definitely stopped asking why she cries — she's crying, so I must do something.')
'I've become more likely to make a decision and then move on with it,' she says. 'I've started learning to relinquish control in life.'
Apte is curious to see what American audiences make of the film, but says that it has resonated with audiences elsewhere. 'People have found it very relatable, which was quite cool, because when I read it for the first time, no matter how crazy the story felt, it also was very relatable.'