Rating: NR | Runtime: 107 minutes
Release Date: March 14th, 2025 (UK) / May 16th, 2025 (USA)
Studio: Altitude Film Distribution / Magnet Releasing
Director(s): Karan Kandhari
Writer(s): Karan Kandhari

We’re not normal people.

First-time feature film director Karan Kandhari’s Sister Midnight is all over the place—both intentionally so and to its benefit. Because the start is like any other newlywed drama of uncertainty. Two people in an arranged marriage who knew each other as kids, but not really. They sit in silence on the train ride home before, upon arriving at their new shared home, she welcomes his touch only for him to curl in bed so as not to touch her. So, when Uma (Radhika Apte) wakes the next morning to find Gopal (Ashok Pathak) gone (leaving her without food or money), she’s frustrated. When he doesn’t return home until after dark only to pass out on the floor, she’s enraged.

This is the point where we start to get a feel for Kandhari’s comic sensibilities. Things are still pretty much by the book as far as miscommunications, awkwardness, and mistakes (Uma wonders aloud if her husband is dumb or just selfish), but the dead-pan tone of the whole’s mix of silent film-esque facial and body expressions with Wes Anderson-esque reaction shots and pans begin to inject a uniquely off-kilter sensibility. That’s when Uma decides to reject her presumed role of domesticity and accept a paid role of domesticity at a job that takes a four-hour walk to attend. Anything to avoid being in that house with the deafening silence and uncertainty marriage has wrought.

Kandhari isn’t done there, though. Yes, him giving Uma the room to let her take-no-prisoners personality out gives us something to sink our teeth into after the oppressive repetition of Gopal letting her down and Chhaya Kadam’s Sheetal (their neighbor) constantly revealing how things won’t get better as much as they just become routine. But we still need something akin to a purpose or an endgame for the narrative. Rather than turn their evolving (or devolving) union into that linchpin like most relationship dramedies, Kandhari instead focuses on Uma and Gopal’s inability to conform. Because if they have anything in common, it’s that. If he ever found the courage to engage with her, they might even fall in love.

How that non-conformity evolves skirts with horror tropes that I’ll merely allude to with the facts that Uma becomes sickly white to the point women on the street want to know her “whitening” regimen and goats and birds start to chase her (often via what looks to be stop motion animation) despite winding up dead (and undead) for their trouble. Regardless of what’s going on, hers and Gopal’s status as pariahs rapidly crescendos to mob levels of fear and hate. They don’t necessarily help their cause by continuing to act oddly and, at times, aggressively, but is it their responsibility to satisfy the community’s desires or the community’s responsibility to mind its own business?

The back half of Sister Midnight unfolds at a fast pace—perhaps even too fast to fully keep up with everything happening. I think that’s kind of the point as Kandhari is all about idiosyncratic juxtapositions with his soundtrack choices, use of animation without any desire of hiding the technique, and dry humor in traditionally dark, dramatic scenarios. Uma is desperately trying to find her footing as her very identity shifts in rejection of society’s demands. She cannot adjust to being a homemaking or the noise and chaos of the day or the malaise of being married to a stranger who doesn’t know how to not be alone. So, she gets a job, exists in the quiet of night, and leaves Gopal to his own devices … until she’s ready to share her new self with him.

Will it be a successful coming out party that leads to a happily ever after? Or is the “curse” afflicting her destined to keep taking and taking until Uma agrees to cut ties with every last vestige of her former self? The answer is a little bit of both since success doesn’t automatically erase the potential for destruction’s arrival anyway. And Apte entertainingly embraces the challenge with a headstrong attitude that delights in both her refusal of subservience and uncertainty to fully give into what’s happening. Whereas an American coming-of-age-through-horror tale would occur during college, a traditional lens through Indian culture puts it around the same age via marriage.

From being stuck in her parents’ shadow to that of her husband, Uma simply wants to find herself. It’s a strange, chaotic journey to clarity with as many people wanting to help her find that path as those attempting to block it (you might be surprised where Gopal falls). And while those in the latter camp are always operating out of fear, there’s as many who believe her to be a witch as those who wonder if she’s a God. It’s that sort of all or nothing attitude that seeks to erase those of us who merely seek to exist in the middle—to be happy on our own terms. Not miserable and alone or miserable amongst friends, but empowered and unbeholden to anyone. It’s a reinvention that’s worth the mess.

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Radhika Apte in SISTER MIDNIGHT, a Magnet release. Photo courtesy of Magnet Releasing.