Sister Midnight review – deliciously macabre Mumbai marriage-gone-wrong black comedy

This chewy, macabre, deliciously odd feature from British director Karan Kandhari is quite the palate cleanser. A UK-financed, India-set comedy that’s as sticky and dark as congealed blood, Sister Midnight is a bold, defiantly feral and immensely entertaining portrait of a newlywed bride who finds herself singularly ill-suited to her arranged marriage. The central character, Uma, is brought to angular, abrasive life by a sublime turn from Radhika Apte, a star in mainstream Bollywood cinema who co-starred with Dev Patel in Michael Winterbottom’s The Wedding Guest (2018).

Sister Midnight is a movie with a big personality; film-making that doesn’t just break the rules, it seems blissfully oblivious to the fact that there even are any. I have no idea how it got through the meat-grinder, low-budget production process that generally seems designed to smooth down the edges and remove any interesting gristle from a finished film, but I couldn’t be happier that it did. Not all of the big swings and risks pay off, but there’s not a moment here that feels safe or creatively compromised. Every deranged frame is to be cherished.

Former music video director Kandhari’s background feeds into his idiosyncratic vision and broad influences for the film, which premiered to acclaim in Cannes last year and was nominated for four British Independent Film awards (Bifa) and the Bafta for outstanding British debut (it lost out to Kneecap). Born in Kuwait – his family left after the outbreak of the Gulf war – and shaped by wide-ranging cinematic tastes, Kandhari has a magpie eye that brings fresh blood (lots of it) to Hindi-language independent cinema. Emphatically carved into distinct vignettes, Sister Midnight has a punchy energy that’s driven by assertive editing, the score (more of which later) and Uma’s simmering fury. A skilled physical comedian, Apte gives a performance that is an endlessly expressive marvel. Long before a single line is spoken we get into the skin of this rattled, shell-shocked young woman, newly arrived in the buffeting scrum of Mumbai from her provincial village.

Kandhari chooses to focus on visual storytelling rather than relying on the spoken word. This succeeds on several levels. The sparse dialogue – the first 10 or so minutes are pretty much silent, the conversations between husband and wife rarely more than cursory – emphasises Uma’s sense of isolation and otherness in her new life. It also gives Apte the space to showcase her remarkable, almost Keatonesque ability to mine the comedy in even the most insignificant gesture. She holds her body awkwardly, arms rigid in their shackle-like ceremonial wedding bangles, shoulders coat-hanger tense. It’s as though the unfamiliarity of her status as a married woman has seeped into her physicality, and she’s ill at ease in her own body. Later, when she gains confidence and starts to walk around the city, each furious, stomping footstep feels like a reproach to her drunken, disappointing husband.

‘An endlessly expressive marvel’: Radhika Apte in Sister Midnight. Photograph: Altitude

The full extent of Uma’s aversion to married life becomes clear after an audacious swing in tone and plot. Let’s just say that the only pleasures of the flesh that hold any appeal to her come courtesy of the live creatures – an assortment of birds, some larger animals – she chomps and drains of their blood, like feathered juice boxes. That her victims have a tendency to come back to life – rendered through appealing, glitchy stop-motion animation – adds further grisly eccentricity to the story. There’s a passing similarity with Ana Lily Amirpour’s Iranian vampire movie A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, but Sister Midnight is weirder, wilder, funnier and ultimately more optimistic. This is a portrait of a woman who is rejected and pilloried for her inability to fit into society’s expectations of submission and passivity (the vampiric tendencies don’t help matters either), but who eventually finds friends and supporters in fellow outcasts, such as the Hijra sex workers who haunt the city streets at night, plus a herd of animated zombie goats.

The film’s influences are far-reaching. There’s a droll, deadpan aspect to the humour and a precision to the framing that has a kinship with the absurdist work of Roy Andersson (Songs from the Second Floor). The use of colour is sumptuously rich and saturated. Shot on 35mm film, Sister Midnight is exquisitely lit: this is not the kind of picture that allows its mise en scène to lurk in the murk.

But perhaps not unexpectedly, given Kandhari’s background in music videos, the film’s score, by Interpol frontman Paul Banks, and soundtrack are sensational. Eclectic needle drops range from Howling Wolf to Motörhead, Buddy Holly to Blind Willie Johnson, lushly romantic vintage Cambodian soundtrack ballads to Iggy Pop and the Stooges. The last holds a particular significance for Kandhari: the film’s title comes from the 1977 collaboration between Iggy Pop and David Bowie. And Kandhari is currently developing his next project, A Heart Full of Napalm, named after a line in the Stooges’ Search and Destroy. It can’t come soon enough.

• In UK and Irish cinemas