British-Indian film-maker Karan Kandhari makes a stylish and offbeat feature debut with a black-comic horror set in Mumbai, elegantly shot by Sverre Sørdal and designed by Shruti Gupte – and if it runs out of road a bit before the end, and can’t quite decide what the point of everything has been … well, we’ve had a lot of laugh-lines, shocks and ingenious sight gags along the way. With its deadpan drollery and rectilinear tableau scenes, Sister Midnight takes something from Wes Anderson and Jim Jarmusch and also – at its most alarming – something more from Polanski’s Repulsion.
The movie’s satirical theme is the horror of arranged marriage, or maybe the intimate horror of marriage full stop – the feeling of being trapped, of suddenly and mysteriously not knowing who or what your partner is, the delirious fear and hate that can boil up out of nowhere for your spouse and yourself. Radhika Apte plays Uma, a woman who has arrived in Mumbai to start life as a housewife after an arranged marriage, the groom having gone on ahead to where he has already established himself in what is to be their modest marital home. (Apte also played an arranged bride in Michael Winterbottom’s The Wedding Guest) The wedding itself has evidently already taken place, and her husband is Gopal (Ashok Pathak), an unprepossessing guy from her home village with whom she hasn’t really spoken since they were both children, and who now spends his leisure hours at home loafing around, not talking to his wife, watching TV and masturbating. “You used to be so sensitive!” complains Uma. “I was eight,” replies Gopal.
Gopal has no idea how to talk to his bride and his fear of the wedding night indicates that he could be a virgin. As for Uma, when Gopal is away at work, she has no earthly idea how (or why) she is supposed to be a wife. Her grumpy next-door neighbour Sheetal (Chhaya Kadam) tries to teach her how to cook, but Uma is hardly a natural at this. She’s also terrible at the demeaning business of managing on a housekeeping allowance, like someone from the 1950s. And all alone, with nothing but her feelings of boredom and resentment and rage, Uma begins to lose it – she hears noises, she has hallucinations regarding birds and goats, which are represented in stop-motion animation. Or are they real? She takes a cleaning job for something to do, but that only provides a second, alternative location for her imminent nervous breakdown. What on earth is going on?
I can imagine Sister Midnight as a first novel as well as a first movie, and though some of the stylistic tics and mannerisms are maybe a little too showy, this is an engaging, extrovert film which cleverly uses the Mumbai setting and gives us a sprightly setpiece on Juhu Beach. It’s a great comic turn from Apte who deserves to be better known.
• Sister Midnight is in UK and Irish cinemas from 14 March.
