‘Sister Midnight’ review: Radhika Apte is a blast as a rebellious housewife with a dark side

It’s hard to decide what Uma hates more – marriage in itself, her husband in particular or all of humanity. Uma (Radhika Apte) arrives in Mumbai from her village as Gopal’s bride, about as cheerful as a child who has been assigned homework during her summer vacation.

The bangles rattling on the bus transporting Uma to the city sound like chains – one of the several sonic clues to Uma’s fate in Karan Kandhari’s Sister Midnight. Kandhari’s debut feature, a deadpan comedy about repression and freedom, was completed in 2024 and has finally been released in India.

Gopal (Ashok Pathak) is too stupefied by Uma’s very presence in their one-room home to react adequately to her many provocations. Uma cooks badly, keeps house terribly and wanders off at will. Why can’t you be like the others, Gopal plaintively says, scarcely realising that Uma has a feral side that is aching to be let out.

The Hindi-language film’s English title has been literally translated as Sakhi Ratri, but surely it should have been Raat Rani. For that is what Uma is – a flower of the night, wild and growing in all directions as she chafes at Mumbai’s super-dense crush load and responds to her increasingly irrepressible impulses.

The 107-minute film has a fabular...

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