IMDB
There’s a common misconception in the cultural zeitgeist that South Asia does not have a punk-rock culture. With convergent portrayals of oriental spirituality and normative collectivism, South Asian media is seen as anything but subversive or anarchaic. We can be demure, mindful, elegant, oppressed, dirty, holy and a million other things — but not troublemakers for the sake of being troublemakers. Disregard the blatant nihilism of Hinduism or even the historic tradition of South Asian women lining their eyes with kajal (dark eyeliner); in the eyes of the mainstream, such thuggery is reserved for Western icons of culture — the Green Days and Nirvanas of the world.
Karan Khandari’s new dark comedy “Sister Midnight” smashes this preconceived nexus, following the misadventures of the misanthropic Uma (Radhika Apte) after her arranged marriage to the village idiot forces her to move from her hometown to the slums of Bombay. With the saturated coloration of a Wes Anderson film, the cinematography of director Quentin Tarantino and the decadent sexuality of Jeremy Reed’s book of the same name, “Sister Midnight” breaks into the Indian indie film scene with a whole lot of anger, cynicism and satire to say a whole lot of … nothing.
Uma, the protagonist, grapples with her status as an outcast. Her feminist rage and disdain for Indian society, particularly the behavior of its men and pointless gendered customs, naturally push her into social isolation. Disconnected from her new husband, Gopal (Ashok Pathak), she defies norms of the Bombay homemaking slum women and begins working as a cleaning lady in a high-rise office. There, she befriends a suicidal alocholic and a group of hijra (intersex) women. However, this all falls to the wayside when a mosquito bite she received during a wedding back in her village causes her to develop bloodthirsty meat-eating tendencies. Despite the high stakes of moonlighting as a creature of the night, the film consistently maintains its slow pace. That is until its rapacious climax, when Uma, after a carnal night of pleasure with Gopal, leaves his body dead and rotting in their house as she is chased by a group of men through Bombay.
The narrative sequencing of “Sister Midnight” feels like a fever dream, as odd and disconnected incidents slowly build into a jagged puzzle before falling apart right at the climax. While Apte’s brilliant performance — which Khandari himself praises for its physicality — and Khandari’s exotic cinematography entice viewers and keep them watching, it’s hard not to feel like you walk away with very little at the end of the film. Much of this is due to how “Sister Midnight” seems to cater to the quintessential Gen Z audience influenced by the aesthetics and visual storytelling of ultimately substanceless Instagram Reels or TikToks.
Each scene was storyboarded carefully by Khandari, who even reached out to rock band Interpol’s frontman Paul Banks for a specially curated soundtrack that swings wildly from Iggy Pop to Cambodian soul to Bengali folk. The vision was to create a story that felt thrilling to watch and hear, with limited dialogue, exciting contrasts and exaggerated physicality meant to carry much of the film. However, the result is a film that viewers must fight to understand and, when we are able to extract the message, that depicts nothing more than a disappointingly overused trope.
The stark relation between horror and societal commentary has been a cornerstone of films like Khandari’s. From “Dracula” to “Jennifer’s Body,” horror — particularly monsterism — has often been used as an allegory to comment on constraining structures of inequality. Topics like childbirth, sexuality and female rage have been tackled through the visually shocking lens of body horror in feminist cinema. Khandari’s film addresses the issue of female isolation — more specifically, the opaque loneliness migrant women feel in the big sprawl of urban cities, doubly compounded by class-caste and gender barriers.
Uma’s unwillingness to accept her vampirism is used as a metaphor for her struggle with her societal isolation. The film ultimately ends with her boarding a train out of Bombay, wearing all-black garb complete with black lipstick and eyeshadow. It’s an incomplete ending to a film that felt hazy in its vision to begin with, relying on long-standing artistic commentaries that connect monsterism with feminism. Despite its glossy sheen and trailblazing goal to showcase the weirdos of South Asia, the film hardly gives the viewer anything revolutionary. Instead, the film rests on the mystique and misogyny of Bombay to carry it, with Khandari taking inspiration from films like “Taxi Driver” and “Chungking Express,” where cities loom large.
This is the latest in a long line of indie films that mark a resurgence of Indian alternative film’s love affair with the city of Bombay, from Payal Kapadia’s “All We Imagine as Light” to Anuparna Roy’s “Songs of Forgotten Trees.” “Sister Midnight” ends up lost in this saturation of contemporary films that connect Bombay, migrancy and sexism to social isolation.
However, at the end of the day, “Sister Midnight” does showcase the powerhouse acting of both Apte and Ashok Pathak, two bright spots of light in a film about the nocturnal darkness inside of us. But, more than that, “Sister Midnight” makes a radical statement: South Asians can be grunge too.