I watched Sister Midnight only because Radhika Apte was in it. She’s one of the few actresses I truly admire — bold, nuanced, and fearless in her choices. But wow... this film? It made no sense. Absolutely none.
From start to finish, this was not a story. It was a disturbing collage of blood, birds, hallucinations, and random acts of violence masquerading as art.
Characterization? Missing. Logic? Thrown off a building.
Uma, the protagonist, is portrayed as a woman trapped in a depressing marriage inside a Mumbai chawl. Fine. But her character is so bizarrely underdeveloped that I kept wondering: Where did she grow up? How does she not know how to cook, clean, or do basic tasks? She’s not some upper-class rich girl raised by butlers. She’s from a modest background — surely, she’d have picked up these basic life skills?
Instead, she’s painted as helpless to the point of being almost childlike — until suddenly, she starts killing animals, drinking blood, and hallucinating her way into a full-blown breakdown.
Violence for what? Shock value.
What disturbed me wasn’t just the violence — it was the way the film used it as some kind of “spiritual awakening.” She kills birds. She butchers a baby goat. Her husband dies (conveniently) right after their first sexual interaction, and she just... wraps him in fairy lights? Then dismembers him and burns his body like it’s part of some divine mission?
And not once does the film pause to ask, why is she doing this? There’s no remorse. No reflection. Just a trail of gore glamorized as symbolism.
Hallucinations, sadhus, and goddess delusions — for what purpose?
There’s a sadhu rubbing her face with ashes. A random scene where people treat her like a goddess. Some cryptic witchcraft vibes. None of it connects, none of it explains anything. It's just... there. Like the director had a bucket of bizarre ideas and threw them at the screen hoping it would look “deep.”
🌱 Growth? Actually yes — but they killed it off.
Here’s what makes it worse: Uma was making progress.
She made a friend in the hijra community.
The watchman supported her.
Her neighbor even taught her to cook.
She got a job and started finding independence.
But instead of letting that be her arc — rising from emotional suppression to self-reliance — the film trashed it all and threw her into a downward spiral of senseless violence. For no reason.
Final thoughts!
This wasn’t powerful. It was grotesque. It wasn’t artistic. It was incoherent. And it definitely wasn’t feminist. It’s easy to throw a woman into madness and call it "liberation." It’s harder — and far more meaningful — to show her fight, heal, and rise without leaving a trail of corpses.
I came in expecting nuance from Radhika Apte. What I got was an hour and a half of disturbing, disjointed chaos.
Rating: 1/5 (and that 1 is only for Radhika’s commitment to the role)
Watch it if you enjoy surreal cinema with zero grounding in reality. Otherwise, save your time — and your sanity.