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“I’m Not Interested in Horror Films”: Karan Kandhari on Sister Midnight
Radhika Apte and Ashok Pathak in Sister Midnight It’s a full eight-and-half minutes into Sister Midnight before newlyweds Uma (Radhika Apte) and Gopal (Ashok Pathak) even say a word to each other; conflict immediately ensues. Confined to a cramped, one-room apartment after moving to Mumbai, the spitfire Uma finds herself ill-suited to the rigid traditional roles expected of Indian brides. Her bashful husband, on the other hand, rebuffs her attempts to seduce him with a polite handshake. In this lonely arranged marriage of stifled desires and out-of-sync conversations, even bangles soon begin to feel like shackles. Despite this, Karan Kandhari’s Hindi-language directorial debut unfolds as a domestic drama with a droll comic touch before shifting into a more supernatural gear as Uma gives in to burgeoning feral impulses, packing in a wealth of observational detail about Indian culture and society alongside charmingly fantastical elements such as stop-motion animals.
Sister Midnight premiered at Cannes in 2024. Skirting over spoilers on Zoom ahead of the film’s theatrical release from Magnet Releasing on May 16, Kandhari spoke about being a Londoner writing about working-class Mumbai, the more frustrating notes he got from potential financiers and Indian censorship.
Filmmaker: Sister Midnight took a decade to make. Could you walk me through that journey?
Karan Kandhari: It took a long time, I guess because the film does very strange things with its narrative. It takes an archetype of a character from a certain genre but doesn’t execute it in the context of that genre. The lack of dialogue was also an issue—the film doesn’t explain anything, and financiers are always nervous when they come up against something odd. We live in the age of explanation. You can go on YouTube and there will be 500 videos “explaining” the ending of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). That’s ridiculous to me, because every time I watch that film it’s different. So, it took a long time to find people brave enough to take a chance on this. Eventually we were lucky to have access to funding bodies such as Film4 and the BFI in the UK.
Filmmaker: What were some of the frustrating notes that you got?
Kandhari: Let’s see if I can answer this without upsetting anyone. It can be such a committee sometimes, and I don’t think anything can be achieved by boiling down art from a committee standpoint. A lot of people thought that nobody would care about Uma or that she was too unlikeable. People wanted me to sentimentalize things, and the film is firmly unsentimental. A lot asked for explanations. I think a lot of these notes came from a place of fear. I didn’t want to treat the audience like infants. Cinema has a grammar and we need to use it in its entirety—sound and image together, rather than just dialogue. There was also this fear of, “Oh, nobody’s going to get it,” especially with regards to what Uma turns into. I always wanted it to feel like a sickness rooted in the real world, but people wanted me to amp up the genre elements. I didn’t, because I don’t think in genre [terms]. Art should surprise, because you wouldn’t want to see the same thing you’ve seen before, and it should ask more questions than it answers, because then the audience will engage with it.
Filmmaker: A supernatural transformation occurs in the film. What made you think that specific creature from the horror mythos was a great metaphor for the kind of story you wanted to tell?
Kandhari: It’s an archetype of a character you’d normally find in a horror film, but I’m not interested in horror films. I don’t understand them. That character, to me, is the ultimate outsider. It leads such a lonely existence, and the film is so much about loneliness. It’s about not having a manual to be a man, a woman, a husband, a wife or even the thing that the woman transforms into. It was within the logic of the film that she would be inexperienced in all of these areas. It’s a film about turning into something you didn’t choose—how do you live with that?
Filmmaker: So many Hindi-language movies about arranged marriage feature women who reach a compromise or set aside their own desires. With Sister Midnight, it’s great to see a woman who not only gives into her wilder impulses by the end, but also doesn’t attempt to disguise her fury right from the beginning.
Kandhari: It’s interesting that you say that because when we were trying to get the film made some years ago, we had a meeting with an exec who said, “I don’t get it. She’s already so fully formed right from the beginning.” And I said she wasn’t, not fully. Uma has all these desires and impulses, but she’s untrained. I saw her as a jar of unstable plutonium that wasn’t yet refined in a reactor. Hopefully by the end, she is. Uma doesn’t fit in and doesn’t know what to do with herself. Everything she does is impulsive and reactionary. There’s this innocence to her, almost like she’s acting younger than her age, and so is her husband. Look at these two manchildren thrown into this situation of being forced to act like adults together. How do you, as a person who doesn’t fit in, embrace your outsider-ness and refine things inside you that could be considered a hindrance but are actually a strength? By the end, Uma’s able to harness that and is a bit more at peace with herself. She’s still grumpy! But at peace with her grumpiness.
Filmmaker: Trains are a shorthand for romance in Hindi cinema, whether it’s Raj pulling Simran onto the train by the end of Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995) or Geet and Aditya’s train meet-cute in Jab We Met (2007). And yet you bookend the film with train journeys, neither of which are romantic—one evokes loneliness, the other freedom.
Kandhari: I have to be honest, I don’t know very much about modern Indian cinema. I’m oblivious. I’m interested in things that echo and loop, like punk music based on repeated motifs and slight variations that feel transcendental. The bookend felt right because Uma’s arriving in the first scene and then leaving in the last. Both train journeys are leading her into the unknown but she’s in a very different mindset each time. The first journey takes her into Mumbai, into this marriage and by the end, who knows where she’ll go? The loneliness isn’t a hindrance to her anymore.
Filmmaker: If not Indian cinema, what were some of your other cinematic influences?
Kandhari: My great love is silent cinema. I don’t watch stuff while I’m writing or making a film, but these things fed me in the years leading up to this film—Buster Keaton, who is a hero of mine, and how the work of Robert Altman depicts the messiness of human life, his anarchic approach to narrative and breaking the rules of filmmaking. More than anything, it was music that I was listening to and lyrics that I latched onto. There was a lot of Bob Dylan and Patti Smith informing the attitude of this film.
Filmmaker: You’ve spoken about writing Uma as an outlaw figure. You’re a bit of an outsider yourself, in that you’re a man adopting a woman’s perspective and interiority in this film, and also a Londoner born in Kuwait depicting a working-class Mumbai, yet both those depictions feel true to life. Could you talk to me about the work that went into getting them right?
Kandhari: When people make films in India about this social spectrum, it’s generally kitchen-sink. I never set out to do it like that—humans are strange, flawed, conflicted and neurotic on all sides of the social spectrum. It was never supposed to be a film about poverty. It’s the same with the protagonist being a woman—I never set out thinking about gender or saying, “I’m going to write a woman.” I’m just trying to illustrate the human experience in all its different ways.
The idea for this film came to me when I visited Mumbai for the first time 20 years ago. I was staying near a settlement like the one in the film and got to know someone there. There’s no reason to exoticize [working-class] people or put them under a microscope. Even though the film contains an arranged marriage, we had a screening recently and people were saying, “Oh my god, I saw so much of my relationship in this and I’m not in an arranged marriage.”
I was very curious about the city. It’s such a mystery. There are so many cultures and it’s a big puzzle. I’ve visited Mumbai several times, and it was really about letting the city and its people speak to me. The street on which Uma and Gopal stay in the film is based on a real one in Khar and Bandra that we couldn’t use. It took a while and was quite nerve-wracking to find something that had the same feeling of the original place in terms of neighborhood, where we could then build our own shops on one end and set-up a strip of shacks [on the other]. It was important to go back to capture what those shacks were like. They’re beautiful. When you go to these places in Mumbai, they’re not destitute. People are proud of their homes. They’ve built little worlds, and we wanted to capture that.
Filmmaker: I was struck by your depiction of Mumbai. There’s a scene of a couple weeping at Marine Drive—great beauty and great unhappiness co-exist. You also shot at busy, crowded locations like train stations.
Kandhari: That was crazy. At the train station, we had our own track and extras. Any time we needed to be in the city when it needed to look busy, we’d embed our own extras among the people. Once Uma pops out of Churchgate station, we were shooting from the top of a building across the road and it was busy—Mumbai, as you know, is bursting with activity. We wanted a sea of people there, so we embedded 40 of our extras so she would get sucked into the crowd while the city could go on and nobody would realize we were shooting a movie. That’s the only scene we shot in such a fashion. For Marine Drive, we had to shut off a small section of it, deal with the chaos of the crowds and embed some of our own people. You have to embrace the chaos of Mumbai—that’s something we wanted to depict because it’s so populated and busy in the daytime, then at night it turns into a ghost town. I always found that fascinating and visually interesting.
Filmmaker: The nighttime scenes capture the city’s isolation and yet how electric and alive it can sometimes feel.
Kandhari: All big cities, as busy as they are, are hubs for loneliness. Films sometimes depict the well-to-do parts of the city, or destitute areas, but what about on the fringes in the grey areas? All the people Uma meets exist in this sort of nocturnal world, either working night shifts or unconventional jobs. They’re misfits in their own way. And even though you’re surrounded by people, the city can be a very lonely place. The first time I went to Mumbai, I felt this overwhelming sense of loneliness because it can be a very overwhelming place to penetrate if you’ve just stepped off the boat, so to speak.
Filmmaker: Tell me about writing Gopal. He isn’t a cruel husband, just oblivious.
Kandhari: He’s just a bit inept, right? And that doesn’t make him a bad person. I’m really proud of his character and mostly of what Ashok Pathak brought to him, because he made him even more human than I could’ve intended. It’s not about Gopal being a bad person. Like Uma, he’s inexperienced. In any relationship, you have expectations crashing with needs and reality. He was always meant to be a mystery, like many men who have their own insecurities or can’t fully express emotion. You can’t quite put your finger on what’s going on. Uma and Gopal are equally idiotic, and I say that with empathy. They’re just struggling to function in adulthood.
Filmmaker: Uma not only has these hilariously specific line readings but conveys so much through expressive glances and stares. What were the conversations you had with Radhika Apte to calibrate that performance?
Kandhari: Radhika’s an amazing actor and a very deep-thinking, intellectual person. Each actor brings their own approach to a character and hers is quite cerebral. She needs that in her process, but my challenge for her was to de-intellectualize it, because there’s so little dialogue in the film and so much had to be conveyed physically in silent scenes. Once we went through the backstory, we had to root the performance in the present moment and in the body, which expresses so much. That’s the beauty of cinema. It’s not theater and so you can, in a closeup, observe what somebody’s facial muscles can do, or use a wide shot to see what their posture is saying. We had a shorthand with each other. There were moments on set when I was cracking up during a take because she did something and no one else was laughing because they had no idea what was going on, and that was great because we were locked in with a unified intention. In some scenes, she just became this strange feral animal.
Filmmaker: What was the thought process behind using stop-motion animals in the film? They add so much to the humor and surrealistic feel.
Kandhari: There are real animals in the film. When the narrative shifts in Sister Midnight [after the transformation], the animals become stop-motion. I’m not into CGI because nothing can replace real light hitting physical phenomena like hair or skin. You can’t fake light no matter how hard you try. I’ve always found stop-motion beautiful and charming because we needed the animals to be just a little bit fucked up, a little bit askew from reality. Stop-motion, by nature, gives you that without you having to push or lean into anything weird. It’s just naturally, charmingly off. And it’s very funny.
Filmmaker: Tell me about the soundtrack, which is such an eclectic collection. You’ve mentioned the inclusion of Cambodian soul music, which I’m curious about.
Kandhari: Music is my big love and constant companion when I’m writing. A lot of the soundtrack was written into the script. I wanted to utilize the music that I was interested in, but I also wanted to put together things that really shouldn’t go together. Why not use a Motörhead track while a woman is running through a Mumbai slum? The film came together like a cultural collage. Lots of people have mistaken the Cambodian soul music in the film for Indian music—it’s not! There’s no Indian music in the film. Cambodian music is so beautifully strange; it’s got the same high-pitched vocal timbre of Indian music, but also sounds like somebody tried to replicate a Phil Spector song and got this beautiful mutation. Cambodian music also always made me think of Mumbai, which is its own weird mishmash of things.
Filmmaker: It’s a real bummer to think that for a film so rooted in Mumbai, Sister Midnight might not get an Indian release in its current form, without likely censorship of its nudity or expletive-laden dialogue. You’ve spoken about not having watched a lot of Indian cinema — did that free you up though to make the movie you wanted without worrying about configuring it for an Indian release?
Kandhari: I don’t believe in templates. Each story dictates its own logic and structure; I’m a bit anarchic with the form. We’re waiting to hear back from the Censor Board [of Film Certification in India] and I’ll be really upset if this thing gets mangled. That would be absurd. Why is nudity an issue? If you look at all these ancient statues and art in India, there’s nudity everywhere. It’s a strange thing to sanitize culture, cutting out expletives and things. For a film with very little dialogue, I think the word “motherfucker” shows up more times than any other word. It’ll be interesting to see what they think of that.
