Sister Midnight

Sister Midnight is one of those rare films that starts off feeling raw and real, and then slowly descends into something completely unexpected. What begins as a story about a woman trapped in a dull, affectionless marriage turns into a surreal, psychological journey filled with dark humor and horror. Radhika Apte is absolutely brilliant-her performance is both haunting and deeply emotional. The film's second half is wild, unsettling, and hard to look away from. It won't be for everyone, but if you're into bold, strange cinema that pushes boundaries and makes you think, this one is worth watching. It stays with you.

Where to begin with this movie? Well first a heads up; the trailer gives away nothing about where this movie ends up going. I'm not going to spoil it here although in all honesty it's not particularly interesting.

The movie opens promisingly by introducing our main characters Uma and Gopal, an unhappily (recently) married couple living in Mumbai. Uma has been uprooted from her home and moved to a place she doesn't understand.

The first 45 minutes or so are her trying and failing to get to grips with her new life with her unsatisfactory husband. The first 15 minutes are fine with nice world building, artistic cinematography somewhat reminiscent of Wes Anderson. There are some comedic elements within quite a dialogue sparse set of scenes that are essentially a series of vignettes. But then this just goes on... and on... and on. By 45 minutes in this plodding plot becomes stale and boring.

Then there is the "twist". Uma comes down with an odd sickness. It's not really apparent that this is a plot point until it is repeated multiple times and the audience eventually get the idea of what is happening by brute force.

Then things just get bizarre. I won't say any more to avoid spoiling what little novelty the film has. But it's just all so weird... and this means it's a real struggle to figure out what the movie is supposed to be about.

Such slim pickings of themes and a barren plot will be fertile ground for some (i.e critics) to come up with a plethora of interpretations that somehow rescue the movie from the yawnfest I felt it was. There has to be some reason critical reception for this movie is good right?

Unless the movie is supposed to be a modern retelling of some Indian folklore story I am ignorant of, I am really struggling to understand what it is supposed to be about. This would be less of a problem if the rest of the film has good pacing, funny dialogue or some thrills but it has none of these. It would be a difficult watch even if it was a 20 minute short, let alone a 110 minute feature.

3/10.

This movie is pure chaos, and I loved every second of it. It tells the story of Uma, a young bride trapped in an awkward arranged marriage in Mumbai. As loneliness and frustration build, Uma's descent into animalistic urges becomes both horrifying and strangely liberating. Visually, it's stunning-vibrant, chaotic, and beautifully unsettling. There's a surreal, punk-rock energy that reminded me of Wes Anderson on a horror binge. It's messy in a way that feels deliberate, and I admired the boldness of its style. Not every moment works, but the ones that do are unforgettable. This is one of those films that makes you feel like you've stepped into a dream-or maybe a nightmare.

"Uma" (Radhika Apte) lives in a small tin box of an home with her new husband "Gopal" (Ashok Pathan). She hasn't a clue how to cook their food and neither seem to have much appetite to consummate their nuptials, so the relationship is distant and she has a bit of a temper which the rather subdued gent tends to run away from (and drink). Luckily, she manages to befriend her neighbour "Sheetah" (Chhaya Kadam) and they share stories about how useless men are whilst she struggles with the boredom of life. She eventually decides to get a job as a cleaner which breaks up the inanity a little, but she also starts to find herself drawn more and more to the animal kingdom. A passing encounter with a goat, then a bird, starts to see her question her almost vampiric behaviour. When an even more curiously tragic incident occurs, the story becomes increasingly surreal and the lines between truth and fiction become almost macabrely blurred. Apte is quite entertaining here as her aggressive and slightly stand-offish character becomes more eccentrically engaging and Pathak also delivers quite well as the hapless husband, but I found the story all too weak and repetitive for too long before the last ten minutes or so finally raise some more interesting aspects of superstition, perhaps even witchcraft, and shines a light a little on the vagaries of her tight knit community who are quick to make snap judgements. Though it's not graphic, it's not for the squeamish and it's those few scenes where most of the dark comedy kicks in, but again there weren't really enough of them to sustain this. It has it's moments and is worth a watch for "Uma" wandering lonely as a goatherd through the city beating a mop and pail, but it will look just as good on the telly.

It's wonderful to see that, for a few years now, genre cinema that isn't made in the USA has managed to revitalize it, sometimes doing nothing more than reappropriating the codes to serve a bigger idea. It occurs to me to quote Antonio Gramsci when he said "The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born: Now is the time of monsters". Although in all eras there has been room for monstrosities that represented real problems in society, from the Cold War to McCarthyism, today seems to be the culmination of the age of the monster. An era in which metaphors have come full circle and begun to self-ironize. The best contemporary films about monsters are, in fact, about old monsters, those that have never gone away and that, by golly, are still here. Their cinematic existence is endowed with a meta contemplation that finally makes horror cinema a supreme species and language for those of us who perceive the world as it should never have been.