Director – Karan Kandhari – 2024 – UK, Sweden, India – Cert. 15 – 110m
***1/2
A young woman in an arranged marriage discovers herself to be a creature of the night… and one of the undead – genre-bender is in UK cinemas on Friday, March 14th
A young woman travels cross-country by train, face veiled by beaded hangings, to join the arranged marriage husband she has (presumably) never met in their new, urban home. Uma (Radikha Apte) and Gopal (Ashok Pathak best known here from The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, John Madden, 2015) don’t seem to know what to do with each other. Certainly not any sort of sexual congress as they unveil sitting beside one another for the first time. As the tale proceeds, sleeping with him comes to consist of curling up on her own on the other side of the bed from him. Later, her sleeping patterns will start to shift…
Theirs is a pretty basic home – a room with a mattress and a door out onto the bustling, main street outside. Her husband has a job, so goes out in the morning and comes back in the evening, although sometimes he goes out drinking after work and comes back later. So is left alone at home to do the household chores. Her first bare foot placed outside their front door on the first day lands straight in a pile of poop. She quickly discovers that borrowing household items off the female neighbour (Chhaya Kadam from All We Imagine as Light, Payal Kapadia, 2024; Laapataa Ladies, Kiran Rao, 2023; Bombay Rose, Gitanjali Rao, 2019) comes down to a system of barter: I’ll lend you this if you’ll lend me that.
However, she can’t get her head round cooking; specifically, she can’t work out how to combine the ingredients from the shops into any coherent sort of whole. She doesn’t appear to be cut out for the life of a traditional housewife. In due course, the barter woman from next door will admonish her about failing in her wifely duties.
Finding it increasingly hard to sleep at night, she starts leaving the home in the dark. She takes on a basic cleaning job, involving a mop, which she carries to and from her place of work. She stands amongst bin bags as a man comes to hurl his own full bag onto the pile. One night, she finds a goat: there is blood on her mouth. The goat is dead. Another night, she finds a small bird and bites its head off, carefully wrapping up the body in white cloth and placing it in a drawer under the mattress; and she does this on successive nights util the drawer is full.
She invites her husband outside for a smoke. They talk. They lie together on the grass. It seems more like friendship than a more intimate relationship. He gets talked into going out to the beach with his work colleague Ramu (Dev Raaz) and his wife. Our heroine, not cut out for such social intercourse, takes the wife’s dog for a walk and gives it away to a stranger and his small son before doing a runner with her husband, leaving their baffled hosts behind on the beach.
The birds start reanimating (in shots realised via stop-motion animation), walking or flying out from under the bed. So too with a small herd of dead goats, which turn up at the doorstep looking very much alive. She likes her husband, even to the point of passionately kissing him, but doesn’t want to turn him into a member of the undead. What’s a girl to do?
Whether you take this as a slice of Indian, arranged marital life or a vampire film – it’s undoubtedly both although might possibly not be to the tastes of anyone who likes the sound of either possible, separate variant – this highly original genre-bender delivers an idiosyncratic vision. Director Kandhari has an equally distinctive way of telling stories. The narrative is constructed in lots of short bursts of individual scenes, often bookended by fade-outs, interrupting the flow of the piece to lend it a unique staccato feel. A sense of jerkiness. One is occasionally reminded of the rhythmic punctuation in the editing of Pi (Darren Aronofsky, 1999). The sparing use of stop frame (in which the jerky movement is played upon rather than any attempt made to make it look slick or smooth) adds further to the already unreal overall ambiance. The wild colour palette, however, marks it out as completely different viewing experience to Pi.
A second train journey at the finale adds a satisfying sense of symmetry to the whole.
The editing style causes a peculiar disrupted flow which serves to distance the viewer from the piece, emphasising the artifice aspect, the fact that this is not real but a construct, a movie. Whether that quality works for or against the movie as a whole is something audiences will have to decide for themselves, and it may well polarise them. For myself, on a first viewing, I’m not sure as to on which side of that aesthetic argument I come down. Working out the names of the characters is not an easy task, as character names are rarely mentioned. Yet, that minor niggle aside, there is much to admire here.
Sister Midnight is out in cinemas in the UK on Friday, March 14th.
Trailer:
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