Sister Midnight

She doesn’t receive an answer, but the fact that she was compelled to ask in the first place is part of what makes her — and writer/director Kandar Kandhari’s remarkably assured debut — so compelling. It’s no coincidence that Uma (Radhika Apte) directs her query at the moon rather than the sun or any other celestial body, as it’s at night that her new self initially emerges in this eclectic genre mashup. And while it might seem like a given that the moon doesn’t respond, that would hardly be the strangest thing to happen in Sister Midnight.

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Newly arrived in Mumbai for an arranged marriage she views as a life sentence, Uma possesses few of the skills associated with traditional brides. She can’t cook, doesn’t defer to her aloof husband Gopal (Ashok Pathak) on much of anything, and has never balanced a checkbook. But well-behaved women rarely make compelling protagonists, and Uma’s brash refusal to be anything but herself immediately draws us to her. The problem is, she herself is changing in ways she can neither prevent nor understand. The details of that change are better experienced in the theater, but suffice to say it comes with a body count and a bevy of stop-motion baby goats.

Dialogue is fairly sparse, especially in the first act, when Uma’s body language and facial expressions tell us everything we need to know about how she’s adjusting to her nuptials. She isn’t a fish out of water so much as a frog in boiling water, only she’s aware from the outset what’s happening to her — not that she can do much about it. One thing she can do without drawing attention is emote with a physicality reminiscent of Wes Anderson, an energy matched by Kandhari’s direction and Sverre Sørdal’s kinetic camerawork. You’re never more aware that Sister Midnight is a dark comedy than when Uma is directly facing the camera as chaos, much of it her own doing, unfolds around her.

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Even so, there are so many grace notes that they almost form a chorus. Sørdal’s lush cinematography is awash in vibrant colors and textural film grain. The soundtrack by Interpol frontman Paul Banks jumps from old-school radio hits from both India and America to Banks’ own cover of the eponymous Iggy Pop song. Mostly, though, it all comes back to Apte and her aspirational performance. She portrays Uma’s struggle to find her way with all the precision of a guided missile zeroing in on emotional truths that women like her are rarely allowed to express. Not that she asks for permission to speak up: “Are you sad?” she asks a dour-looking man she encounters in an elevator one day. “This is just how God painted my face” is his poignant response.

Well-behaved women rarely make compelling protagonists.

The instincts overcoming Uma are feral, but they’re also freeing. Uma isn’t so much transforming into something different as she is letting something already inside of her rise to the surface after years of being repressed. She’s afraid of it, but she’s also intrigued — a feeling that many viewers will share. It helps that Kandhari is far from humorless in his depiction, as evidenced in a brief montage of Uma capturing small creatures and saying “sorry” every time. Sister Midnight’s wry sense of humor is ever present, with a punk-rock ethos befitting its heroine’s devil-may-care attitude. One person’s unhinged is another person’s liberated.

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Alongside All We Imagine as Light’s Payal Kapadia and Santosh’s Sandhya Suri, Kandhari represents a new guard of Indian filmmakers foregrounding women who are usually overlooked — both in society and onscreen. All three movies premiered at Cannes last May, marking a banner year for Indian cinema that one hopes will be repeated soon. Kandhari, for his part, already has a clearly defined aesthetic matched by a clear affinity for Uma that it’s nearly impossible not to feel just as strongly. It’s hard being human, she reminds us, hence why some people want to be something else.