Early in Sister Midnight, Karan Kandhari’s raucous new film, its heroine, Uma, a discontented new wife, finds work as a cleaner. She and her awkward husband have moved to Mumbai, where she fails, comically, at cooking and housekeeping in the couple’s one-room home.
Uma is equally inept in the workplace, wielding her mop like a bayonet. It’s a brilliant piece of physical comedy from the actor who plays her, Radhika Apte, the Bollywood and Emmy-nominated star of Netflix’s Lust Stories.
“It’s bad mopping,” Kandhari says. “What we’re trying to do is behavioural or observational. So much can be expressed in body language. That’s one of Radhika’s great strengths. It’s a very intellectualised performance.
“I’d lived with the character so long, she was fully formed in my head. I was looking at tons of tapes. I was quite depressed, because we weren’t finding the right person. And then I saw two minutes of a clip from a film. It was like that moment in Mulholland Drive: this is the girl!”
Taking cues from silent cinema, Kandhari’s extravagantly original fable concerns arranged marriage, bad housekeeping and some kind of vampirism. The deadpan of Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel and Ana Lily Amirpour’s A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is echoed in both the script and the central performance.
“Buster Keaton had a massive impact on me, both as a film-maker and a performer,” the film’s affable director says. “Watching his work, I’m still mesmerised by how he can invoke so much with so little, with the tiniest muscle movement. Jacques Tati had a massive impact on me as well. And Toshiro Mifune, who was one of the most amazing physical performers.”
Uma’s domestic boredom is sometimes alleviated by the friendship of her equally frustrated neighbour, played by the All We Imagine as Light star Chhaya Kadam. And then a mystery illness swerves the film into wild comic-horror territory. Even its creator was surprised to read that particular genre attached to the reviews.
“Of course, people call it whatever they want, but I don’t have any relationship to horror,” he says. “I wasn’t setting out to scare people. I have very little knowledge of the history of that genre. It’s not something I get. Anytime I have tried to watch horror I just end up laughing. There’s a lot in the film that’s macabre. It goes to some twisted places. But it wasn’t conscious.”
Sister Midnight premiered to acclaim in the Director’s Fortnight section of Cannes film festival last year. It was subsequently named best film at Austin Film Festival and nominated for four British Independent Film Awards and the Bafta for outstanding debut by a British writer, director or producer (which it lost out on to the Irish film Kneecap.)
“Everything in my life felt very surreal after getting into Cannes,” says Kandhari, in Dublin for his feature’s Irish premiere, at the city’s film festival. “It was mind-blowing. You can’t hope for anything better. We toiled away trying to make this thing. It’s a miracle that any film gets made and seen.
“But to get seen at the Director’s Fortnight, in a cinema with a really vocal audience whistling, clapping and losing their minds, I don’t have the words to describe it. The Fortnight is the punk-rock section of Cannes. It’s where so many of my heroes started out. Scorsese was there with Mean Streets. Jim Jarmusch was there with Stranger Than Paradise. It’s kind of bananas.”
The punk-rock theme doesn’t stop there. Kandhari took his film’s title from Iggy Pop’s 1977 anthem; he is currently developing a feature called A Heart Full of Napalm, whose name is a reference to the Stooges song Search and Destroy.
Sister Midnight has the most eclectic and evocative soundtrack of 2025, featuring Howlin’ Wolf, Buddy Holly, The Band, Motörhead, T Rex, Blind Willie Johnson and, of course, The Stooges, alongside a score by Paul Banks of Interpol.
“Music is my main love,” says Kandhari, who has directed music videos for Franz Ferdinand and The Vaccines. He assembled the soundtrack with Kle Savidge, the film’s music supervisor, with whom he has worked closely over the past decade.
“Our film is music that shouldn’t go together,” he says. “You’ve got Howlin’ Wolf, this croaky, dark American blues, playing over an Indian train at night. But it’s got the rhythm of a train and it’s nocturnal. There’s no Indian music in the film. The closest thing is Cambodian soul music from the 1960s.
“Kle Savidge is my secret weapon. When you get the right juxtaposition it’s kind of magic. It’s like what Iggy Pop does. I’ve been told he’s seen the film. We’re trying to find out what he thinks.”
The film’s often nocturnal visuals are similarly rich. Kandhari wrote most of the screenplay at night while listening to Lou Reed. Sister Midnight is part of a growing retreat to film stock over digital options. The cinematographer Sverre Sordal filmed it on Super 35, the format used by more than half of the movies premiering across all competitions at Cannes 2024.
Prominent directors such as Christopher Nolan and Quentin Tarantino have championed the superiority of film, and Kodak and other companies have responded by resuming production of film stock and expanding their processing labs.
Nothing beats it, according to Kandhari. Digital “doesn’t seem intuitive to me, because I work so much out in preparation. It’s quite ritualistic for me to shoot tests and work out the colour and mess with the negative. I don’t shoot any coverage,” Kandhari says, referring to all the extra shots, such as close-ups, that directors take as well as the master shot, to use in the final film.
“I don’t shoot many takes. Everything is planned. The economy of film suits me. I don’t want excess options. Maybe I’m a bit OCD. I think in cuts and images. The audience is never going to be able to tell consciously, but subconsciously something shifts. It’s a kind of alchemy. That’s why there’s such a resurgence for film.”
The director was born in Kuwait, where his father made adverts until the family were evacuated at the outbreak of the Gulf War. “Making films was all I ever wanted to do, but my dad said, ‘You’re never going to make money,’” Kandhari says. “I had to remind him he used to make commercials. They lost everything during the war and went into the food business.”
Undeterred, Kandhari moved to London. Between 2009 and 2014 he wrote and directed United Howl, a trilogy of award-winning shorts – Hard Hat, Flight of the Pompadour and Sidney – that depict outsiders, loners and immigrants.
“I’ve never really belonged anywhere,” Kandhari says. “I’ve moved around a lot. It’s natural that I’m drawn to characters that are misfits and outcasts.”
It took 10 years to bring Sister Midnight, his first feature, from the page to the screen. People just didn’t get a film that relies on, well, film. And on minimal dialogue.
“I struggled to get this made,” Kandhari says. “Every time I write, when I finish the draft I basically print the thing out, get some white paper and some glue, cover up all the dialogue and check if everything still makes sense. Film has its own grammar, including cuts to black, which we do quite a lot. That seems to have gotten lost.”
Sister Midnight was nominated in the same Bafta category as Santosh, Sandhya Suri’s police procedural starring Shahana Goswami as a widow who inherits her husband’s police job and must investigate a rape and murder in rural India.
It’s a different kind of representation from the pioneering 21st-century efforts of Hanif Kureishi, Gurinder Chadha and Asif Kapadia. Sister Midnight and Santosh feel like a new variant of British-Asian cinema, one that shares DNA with the ancestral looking back of Mati Diop, the French-Senegalese film-maker, in Dahomey, which chronicles France’s return of historically significant objects to Benin.
A lot of British-Asian cinema is “diaspora cinema”, Kandhari says. “I’m not interested in examining my Indianness. But this is the only film I’ve written in India. I feel like this film is European in many ways. I don’t know how, but we snuck it through the British system.”
Sister Midnight is in cinemas from Friday, March 14th
