Hawaii 2024 Review: SISTER MIDNIGHT Has a Punk Rock Flavor

Sister Midnight from Karan Kandhari (Bye Bye Miss Goodnight) is a hard film to review and classify, but I’m going to try after seeing the film at the 44^th annual Hawaii International Film Festival. Funded in part by the British Film Institute and Film4, Sister Midnight opens with a young Indian bride on a train. She doesn’t look happy, and most of us would not be happy to be joined with a veritable stranger in an arraigned marriage within a system that would restrict and confine us to traditional gender roles, with no way to escape.

Actress Radhika Apte (Andhadhun, Merry Christmas) plays the bride; currently, there’s no character name for her listed on imdb, which almost seems fitting, as this is a society that prefers this character be erased and nameless within a patriarchal structure, anyway. Apte and her character, which I’ll simply refer to as “The Bride” from here on out, carries the film as the titular Sister Midnight.

The Bride and her betrothed are completely unprepared for marriage, and in fact, it doesn’t appear that they even know how to act like adults. She can’t even boil rice or lentils, they live in a tiny shack where cars and mopeds drive by just feet from their front door, and the husband is totally inept in everything. They are awkward as hell and don’t know how to behave towards one another. She becomes enraged and he bewildered and somewhat ashamed. After a bit of this, they go to his cousin’s wedding where she turns off the distracting, electric bug zapper, and promptly gets bitten by a mosquito or something else.  

Mostly static shots pervade throughout the film, particularly at the beginning and first act, a visual way of storytelling that tells us that the characters, especially The Bride, are stuck and going nowhere. Fed up with the nothingness, she gets a job located hours away cleaning and moping in a building. Not long after being bitten, she feels sick, stops eating, and some local women near her job ask her for her beauty secrets, a sad indicator that the paler you are in this world, the more desirable you are. There are references to whitening cream and a scene where the characters are conversing beneath a neon sign for such a product.

Furthermore, The Bride develops an aversion to sunlight and becomes increasingly disheveled and feral, an outer look to match her anger and frustration. A baby goat is bitten, birds are munched on, and soon there’s a box full of dead bird carcasses that The Bride hides beneath the bed. Later on, the baby goat becomes reanimated via stop motion animation, and is chased by men in the city. Likewise, the little birds wrapped in white cloth under the bed fly away in a whimsical sequence, tiny mummies of a sort, coming back to life.

Eventually, The Bride decides to like and care for her husband, but then he’s dead. What to do except to wrap his corpse in Christmas lights and prop him up like a fun decoration, and then cut off pieces of him? Blink, and you’ll miss this, or many things in the film, however fascinating, they are brief. Eventually, the neighbors catch on to what’s going on; there’s some symbols drawn on her door in chalk that no doubt are meant to keep away whatever evil is happening from them.

Soon, The Bride’s tiny army of undead, vampiric stop motion goats are too much to care for and she leads them into the woods, tossing pieces of her dead husband to distract them when she flees. Later on, they’re seen being chased by men, and likely these same men chase The Bride with torches, telling her, “You’re a monster.”

To this, she replies, “It’s hard being human. What’s your excuse?” in biting send up of the male oppressors of that country.

The Bride attempts to fit in with some monks, but it doesn’t work. Like a lot of the disaffected, she doesn’t fit in anywhere, so she dresses in all black, gothing out, and hops on a train to a new life, followed by those cute little reanimated goats, who try to catch up.

Sister Midnight has some interesting song choices, like old school American blues and Motorhead. Kandhari has succeeded in making an original vampire film that isn’t quite a vampire film, but if the film is anything, it’s a blueprint in strength and in believing in yourself in a punk rock way, in world that wants you anything but.