None of the town’s Chinese takeaways have anything like the hodgepodge on offer in “Sister Midnight” (Film4), showing now at the Montrose Playhouse. There are mammals: goats, rats, a dog; insects: crickets, mosquitoes, flies; birds: songbirds, pigeons, chickens. There are rotting corpses, dismembered bodies, miracles, funeral pyres, a Hindu wedding; bus trips, train trips, taxi rides, hitchhiking, long-distance walking; arranged marriages, sarcastic friends, doctors of uncertain competence, ascetic sages, an elevator man who sleeps in his elevator. There are beaches, rubbish tips, office-building roofs, narrow streets, dark rooms, a Buddhist monastery. Is this all one big boondoggle? A ginormous riddle? A cryptic crossword? Or is there something we can grasp to try to tie it all together?
While maybe not the strangest movie I have ever seen, this is right up there. It was so bizarre that I came home and immediately started to work on this review, deciding that it is certainly interesting enough to get my head around, at least enough to pen 1000 words.
The premise is conventional enough: a subtitled Hindi movie based upon an arranged marriage between two very poor people (“village idiots”). The marriage is, to say the least, loveless. Gopal, played by Ashok Pathak, works at a printers-workshop and drinks. Uma, played by Radhika Apte, begins her married life completely incapable of cooking for her husband. Uma’s essentially kindly neighbour, Sheetal, played by Chhaya Kadam, teaches her, sort of, how: “if you add enough salt and chilli, [he will] eat anything!” But Uma is impatient and, one day randomly deciding to take the suburban train to the station at the far end of the line, and then equally randomly applying for a job, she is offered a cleaning position in an office-block where she befriends the elevator man. There are many scenes of her walking the streets, mop over one shoulder and a disproportionately large, yellow bucket being flung backwards and forwards in the opposite hand. Until this point the story is reasonably straight-forward, and would seem to be aiming at the husband and wife falling in love with each other despite the unpromising start. But instead, things fall apart.
From the outset, Uma seems to need a great deal of sleep. Why? Is she sick? Depressed? Or exhausted from the grinding poverty and the long night-shifts as a cleaner? Whatever the explanation, she sleeps, and sleeps, and sleeps. Her bed at home is a mattress on the floor, a thin wall and door separating her from the noisy, polluted road outside. Many of her possessions are kept in plastic tubs outside the house. There does not appear to be a bathroom. But she also sleeps on floors, leaning against doors, on mounds of rubbish, on steps, with animals, on the street. Sometimes she collapses from standing into the sleeping posture, other times the camera just shows her snoring. Gopal seems to have lost any sense of confidence in himself. He appears powerless over her, and quite as mystified as the audience. Other than suggesting visiting the doctor, he leaves her be. Maybe he has an inkling that the strangeness is just beginning.
I guess one could say that the plot develops from this mid-point crossroads into a horror film. Certainly much of it is gruesome. But is it actually more bizarre than this? What is the significance of the animated goats which appear several times in the second half of the movie? Why does Uma seemingly make up with Gopal, then murder him, dress him up like a grotesque Christmas tree, then leave his body in their decrepit house to decompose, surrounded by flies and rats? And why does she kill lots of birds, putting their dead little bodies into a drawer, only for them to rise from the dead and become so, well, bird-like, that she needs to restrain them in a bag?
I found my senses opening up as the film progressed. It is challenging, for sure. It is also curiously gripping. Because it is so hard to predict anything that will happen (at least in the second half), my mind was receptive to whatever came. I found it quite easy to drop expectations about the next scene, and soon gave up the futile exercise of pigeon-holing the movie into a conventional category.
For a directorial debut, the film’s camera-work is both confident and convincing. I especially valued the shots of Uma, centred oh-so-perfectly in the middle of the frame, the camera utterly still. A number of the films I have recently reviewed suffer from camera-work perhaps like a teen frantically waving around a smartphone; the director cannot seem to sit still and let us watch in peace. Karan Kandhari succeeds where many others fail, perhaps against all the odds. The bold craziness of the narrative is perfectly contrasted with the careful balance of the camera. There is tenderness in the way the camera lingers, surely the foil to the characters’ disassociating lives. Spoken dialog is sparse. There are very few bit-parts. We can really concentrate on Uma as events unfurl, moment by moment. The appearance of Buddhist monks makes sense: she is very much living in the moment. But the opportunity Uma (maybe?) has of living with them for a while to restore her wellness escapes her, and we return to the repository of jumble.
While based in Mumbai, some of the location-shooting is much closer to home, in Glasgow. While not exactly cluttered, the music felt a bit muddled; essentially arranged in the form of a ballad accompanying a scene. Reflecting on this method, I wonder if it subtly contributed to the sense of dis-attaching. It might be that someone more expert in the musical choices, and the lyrics of the songs, which were in more than one language, might easily spot a specific linkage to help with the clue to 8-across, or some-such.
This is a film that challenge assumptions, especially about money, property and hierarchy. If you enjoy the “mystery movie” nights at the Playhouse, try “Sister Midnight.” You will definitely find it food for thought.
Adam Poole
24 March 2025
If you are interested in viewing this screening, please book your tickets here
