FANTASTIC FEST: ‘Sister Midnight’ Has It All

Karan Kandhari’s debut feature, Sister Midnight, is an unassuming film offering more bite on top of an extremely cool and punk aesthetic. Morphing into a punk take on female empowerment and escape, Sister Midnight was the one film during Fantastic Fest that I entered on a whim. But I was utterly floored by the film’s bold, deadpan take on a bloodthirsty tale.

The film begins with Uma (Radhika Apte) riding the train into Mumbai with her new husband. Having only met a handful of times while kids, the couple are drowning in a heap of uncertainty. Once “home,” awkward is too soft a word to describe the distance between Uma and their husband, Gopal. They won’t watch each other change, and their marriage bed might as well have a 20-foot high wall between the two. Not only that, but foul-mouthed Uma struggles to maintain a domestic life in a cramped apartment. She can’t cook, she hates cleaning, and she is bored out of her mind.

But then Uma acquires a taste for blood. Sick for days, she falls more and more into isolation with reanimated animals circling her no matter how many times she bats them away. But when accidents happen, Sister Midnight’s ability to turn tragedy into comedy thrives.

Sister Midnight is silly, macabre, willfully mean, and a fantastic study on the trap that marriage can put you in. A vampire story that works perfectly as a double feature with Ana Lily Amirpour‘s A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night, Kandhari’s unique aesthetic will remind audiences of Wes Anderson but never feel derivative of that existing style. Instead, Kandhari uses expertly framed shots as narrative devices to highlight tonal shifts in the story as it moves between acts.

Uma’s vulnerability and her resiliency go hand in hand. She makes fun of the world around her instead of succumbing to it, which makes a world of difference in highlighting her path to becoming someone (or something) new. The beginning of Sister Midnight, both in tone and score, is wildly different from its last act, but it earns that stark transition more than any other genre-bending film I’ve seen in 2024.

As Uma, Radhika Apte is breathtaking. She captures the attention of every single frame she is in with her beauty, and her delivery of the quick-witted lines matches it. Never the demure lady, Apte’s Uma is more chaotic than expected. Feeling isolated even in her tight one-room apartment with her new husband, she slowly attracts friends through her different banal adventures through Mumbai. A co-worker, the one neighbor who doesn’t scorn her existence, and a group of hijra who offer kindness when no one else will.

Uma is not the perfect woman by cultural standards, and as she becomes more feral, she finds out exactly who she needs to be. The best performance of Fantastic Fest, Apte is an actress to watch. Oscillating between depressed and isolated to manic and quirky, Uma explores too many emotive reactions to count.

With a killer final sequence showing Uma accepting her new life, Sister Midnight morphs from another woman trapped in a marriage to a woman discovering what life looks like alone. By perfectly balancing elements of camp and dry, deadpan humor, Karan Kandhari captures one of the most unique films at Fantastic Fest and stuns in his debut feature. If Sister Midnight is any indication of the punk filmmaking Kandhari has to offer, I want as much of it as I can get.

Sister Midnight screened as a part of Fantastic Fest 2024.