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Imagine your dream blunt rotation. Now imagine you guys sit down to reimagine the institution of marriage (as you devour some cookies, of course). Forget all that discourse on it being a sacred contract or a battleground for gender politics. Instead, think of it as a site of sheer ontological horror. This is precisely the fever dream that Karan Kandhari’s 'Sister Midnight' delivers. It's a film that masquerades as a black comedy while peeling back the skin of reality itself. We've already had the satires on arranged marriage, and the feminist revenge fantasies. Kandhari creates something much worse: a work of pure existential absurdity, where identity and tradition implode into a glorious mess of blood, sweat, and stop-motion goats.
At the centre of this opera is Uma (Radhika Apte), a newlywed hurled into the chaos of Mumbai’s slums and left with her husband, Gopal (Ashok Pathak). From the outset, the film refuses to engage in the usual sentimental tropes of an oppressed woman fighting back. Uma doesn't want to be a wife, nor does she know how. But neither does she wish to be a ‘liberated’ woman in the neatly packaged, TED Talk-approved sense. Instead, she deteriorates, disintegrates, and mutates — her boredom warping into something grotesque; her marital frustration expressed through carnivorous impulses. Sister Midnight places the norms of marriage under a microscope and watches as they fester into something wholly unrecognisable.
Kandhari, in discussing his approach, says to The Guardian: “There is no manual to be an adult, a man, a woman, a partner, a wife, a husband, any of this.” And this is the film’s greatest theme: it doesn't moralise, it doesn't prescribe a solution. Instead, it presents us with a protagonist who is utterly untamed — a glitch in the matrix of patriarchal domesticity. And, like all true glitches, 'fixing' the system isn't on the cards. Uma wants to break it.
The film’s most striking aesthetic decision — its use of stop-motion animation to depict Uma’s hallucinations — signals a rupture in the fabric of her world. Goats appear, birds convulse and die (only to resurrect and die again), and the domestic space begins to behave like a haunted house. These moments reveal something more unsettling than Uma’s descent into madness — they reveal that madness itself may be the only reasonable response to her situation. If traditional marriage is a script handed down through generations, Uma’s arc is the equivalent of setting that script on fire and watching the ashes spell out 'fuck you'.
Kandhari’s refusal to give us a clean narrative is what makes Sister Midnight so thrillingly destabilising. He doesn't allow Uma to be ‘empowered’ in the way mainstream cinema demands of its female leads. She exists in a state of perpetual becoming, a process that is neither noble nor tragic — it simply is. She is neither hero nor anti-hero, neither monster nor martyr. She is, to borrow from Lacan, ‘not lacking, but excessive.’
The film’s portrayal of Mumbai is equally disobedient. “It’s the most populated place on earth in the day, but after midnight, it’s an absolute ghost town,” Kandhari observes in the same interview with the Gaurdian. The Mumbai of Sister Midnight isn't the Bollywood-fetishised city of dreams, nor the grim slumscape of misery porn. It's chaotic yet vacant; suffocating yet vast.
By the film’s final act, Sister Midnight has abandoned all pretence of convention. It doesn't care whether you leave the theatre with a neatly packaged take-home message. What it offers instead is a rupture — a crack in the mirror. Sister Midnight is deeply strange. It's a film that screams and laughs. At a time where even the most 'edgy' films feel pre-packaged for digestibility, Sister Midnight is an anomaly: a film that refuses to be merely consumed, refuses to be categorised, and most importantly, refuses to be tamed.
