Sister Midnight Review: Radhika Apte Is Glorious In Gleefully Anarchic Drama

Karan Kandhari’s Sister Midnight presents a singular Hindi film heroine. Newly married, Uma (Radhika Apte) moves from her rural home to Mumbai. Initially, she’s a fish out of water in the city. Hurled into domestic conjugality, Uma is completely at sea. She cannot identify with its rules and presupposed expectations. Chafing against it, Uma struggles to settle into this new identity. She never sweetens or underplays her struggle: “I’ve never run a household before.” In a single day, she spends all the money her husband Gopal (Ashok Pathak) gives her for lasting a week. He too turns out terribly fledgling, pushed askew by her almost-fearsome, ruthless honesty. Unapologetic about her needs and desires, Uma wreaks mayhem, just because she willfully goes against the tide.

In a vision of marvelous eccentricity, Apte’s richly embodied performance flirts with comedy, fury and existential disaffection—all in a tightly held breath. Liberated, almost transcending above mere everyday mortality, the actress brings exhilarating, unpredictable power and peculiarity into the most mundane rhythms. Every slight bodily twitch reverberates with incredible livewire energy. Apte makes the wildest turns in Sister Midnight perfectly plausible, springing as a knee-jerk reaction to claustrophobic domesticity. It’s a performance that doesn’t hide its orchestrations, rather revels in it.

Uma has no qualms, no hesitation in speaking her mind, expressing her stark discomfort. She isn’t just someone who refuses to take things lying down; rather, she is annoyed with everything that’s suddenly asked of her. As the rules of an Indian arranged marriage become clear—the husband can afford to be lax, the wife diligent—Uma does try to fit in. But increasingly, her resistance takes over. She realizes quickly that she must venture out. Initially, a bewildered Gopal laments why she couldn’t be just like any regular person. Bitter and seething, she has no patience for fools or being tactful in a new life. Instead, she charts her own course when she notices her husband fumbling spectacularly early into the marriage. He, too, is lost, startled by her lack of inhibition and blinding assertiveness. Uma freely voices her disappointment in his ineptness—his absence as someone she could talk to, rely on. Apte takes Uma’s frustration and molds it in myriad shapes—a spectacle of spirited defiance. Early in the film, Uma gets her wedding bangles broken—them being an inconvenience in housework. She’s strongly warned it’s inauspicious but couldn’t care less.

But Uma’s is also a remarkably dynamic marriage. Kandhari doesn’t lazily render the husband an asshole but radically treats Gopal as someone slowly learning to get on Uma’s wavelength, instead of her having to tame herself. Nothing dents her ragged, fierce, singular stubbornness. In endlessly playful, deliciously violent ways, Sister Midnight is the portrait of a woman discovering the world—and in the process, herself. Much isn’t to her liking. Society is designed to stifle her autonomy and desire. But at every step, Uma widens the ambit of what’s permissible.

Uma and Gopal were friends as kids. However, she barely got to know him, how he has turned out to be, before the marriage got fixed. Everyone just keeps rejecting Gopal, while she’s declared “insane”. Hence, their match is struck, and she is sent far away from home to live with him in the city. As social structures—and the conditioning that comes with them—crashes upon the two, they have to freshly re-align their relationship. Watching Uma and Gopal gauchely traverse their marriage, through ample missteps and gathering warmth, forms one of Sister Midnight’s most delightful gifts.

Critically, Kandhari doesn’t strap Uma with a lonely misfit’s fate. With time, she finds her own little community—motley strangers who guide her through unfamiliar routines—like her neighbor Sheetal (the ever-reliable Chhaya Kadam spouting home truths on the dimness of men with casual spunk) teaching basic cooking, the lift man who takes her to the doctor, or the trans sex workers passing her a cup of tea on her way home from work. It isn’t that the film dials down big-city isolation or its vivid stranglehold. At one point, instead of returning home after work, the lift man goes to the terrace. Uma, who’s about to head home and senses a tug of fear, rushes to be with him. Kandhari builds scenes like this with economy and effectiveness, weaving dark uncertainty with the light that companionship can bring. It’s a delicate moment staged with quiet kindness. Sister Midnight is both about the overwhelming, maddening, suffocating bustle of cities and stray pockets of comfort and alternative kinship. The city crushes, often reminds one of their sheer inconsequentiality. But it also holds wonder, rewarding the curious and bold. Uma navigates the streets of Mumbai with fearless abandon, prising out a life of adventure, removed from marital banality. Her journey with no destination is memorably complemented by an anachronistic soundtrack melding everything from Interpol to Cambodian ballad—each needle-drop as dazzlingly surprising as the streaks of visual absurdity.

Sister Midnight hurtles in increasingly wild directions, as Uma embraces every inch of her wanton side. Working with the film’s vignette-like structure, Napoleon Stratogiannakis’ editing fractures and disrupts, while Uma moves from bloodied misadventures with animals to an all-women monastery. The editing displays the same abrupt spurts of energy that fuels Uma’s strange appetites. Even as Uma descends further and deeper into her ravenous impulses, she is disoriented. At times, she apologizes before going on the rampage, only to sink her teeth with greater primal hunger. Sverre Sørdal’s camera leans into an elaborate visual design—occasional bright pops of color within muted, immaculate frames. It's the kind of film that lets its artists wander with giddy, uncontained mischief-Sørdal and Apte use it to their biggest strengths.

In Sister Midnight, Kandhari goes all out, speeding from surreal stop-motion to Kurosawa homages, briskly cutting between each stormier stage of his indelible heroine. Admittedly, the film does go off the rails in the latter stretch, seemingly unsure of where to take Uma. But Apte grounds every rough curve with such unflinching conviction and gamely passion that she makes the film stick the landing.