Startling, dreamlike, frustrating, funny – Karan Kandhari’s debut feature, “Sister Midnight,” is an absolute original. Which doesn’t mean this diary of a mad Mumbai newlywed doesn’t have its antecedents and influences. In interviews, the British Indian director has spoken of his love for Buster Keaton and Jacques Tati, and the film’s careful framing of explosively reactive slapstick evokes both classic film comedy and the deadpan precision of Wes Anderson. Yet there are darker sources that take “Sister Midnight” in disturbing, elliptical directions reminiscent of Roman Polanski’s “Repulsion” and Ana Lily Amirpour’s “A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night.”
Seeing all these styles put to use in a hectic Mumbai setting – with a killer soundtrack mix of Howlin’ Wolf, T. Rex, Buddy Holly and Cambodian pop, no less – is enough to induce whiplash in a viewer. So hunker down and focus on the just-wed couple at center screen, who are mismatched in expectations, personality and everything else. Gopal (Ashok Pathak) is shy, inexperienced, withdrawn; his new wife, Uma (Radhika Apte), is a born rebel who chafes in fury at being expected to stay home while Gopal goes to work. “How did those two village idiots get married?” Uma overhears someone saying about them. “He’s a loser, she’s insane, their families packed them off together.”
The early scenes of “Sister Midnight” are played for off-kilter comedy, as Uma forces herself to learn the basics of cooking from a neighbor (Chhaya Kadam, majestically bored) and finally pushes back against being left alone in a one-room hovel by her perplexed, virginal husband. Venturing out into nighttime Mumbai, she takes a job cleaning office buildings with a boss (Subhash Chandra) who seems as unhappy as Uma is. “Are you sad?” she asks him. “This is just how God painted my face,” he responds.
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“Sister Midnight” is about loneliness more than anything else, and its vision of a crowded yet mysteriously impersonal city becomes a blank canvas for Uma’s fantasies of alienation and anger. At a certain point, Kandhari takes his fable in an unexpectedly gruesome direction, one with tangential ties to horror conventions but flying on its own oddball semi-comic wavelength. It’s hard to explain exactly how the heroine becomes plagued by adorably stop-motion zombie goats and birds. Like Uma, you just have to roll with it.
The ace up this beguilingly strange movie’s sleeve is Apte, an established actress in Bollywood film and TV who possesses a streak of unruly madcap individualism perfectly suited for this role. With striking presence and a dancer’s command over her physical gestures, she makes Uma’s dislocated fury and ultimately shocking actions both funny and deeply unsettling. That Kandhari frames those actions in coolly contained compositions – the cinematographer was Sverre Sordal – contributes to the air of comic menace.
“Sister Midnight” is a trip, in other words. So where does the trip go? In the end, not very far. The film was a decade in the works while Kandhari made several acclaimed shorts, and it’s an under-sung maxim that one should always be wary of a movie that has lived too long in its maker’s head. In steering his story away from conventional meaning – in keeping it hovering on the edge of a dream that could yet turn into a nightmare – Kandhari robs “Sister Midnight” of momentum and force. It doesn’t build so much as unfold, eventually folding in on itself with a surrealist sigh.
If you prefer your movies to follow proper logic and common sense, then stay home. But if you want to see a talented director putting together pieces of a vision – however unclear – and an actress with the courage to leap with him into the unknown, “Sister Midnight” is worth your time. “I am this thing, but I don’t know what,” Uma tells someone about halfway into this movie’s weird, remarkable journey. Her creator is still working that out, too.
Unrated. At Angelika Film Center. Contains strong violence, language and some drug material. 107 minutes.
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Ty Burr is the author of the movie recommendation newsletter Ty Burr’s Watch List at tyburrswatchlist.com.