One of the regular complaints you hear about film marketing these days is that, in the pursuit of increasing audience awareness of a film's existence to the point where they might consider going to see it, so much gets shared about the plot and production that actually watching the film in a theatre starts to feel like just the last stage in a long process – I suppose this would be the appropriate place to briefly mention the new version of Snow White, which is admittedly a bit unusual simply because of its sheer capacity to agitate commentators of all stripes. Everyone's been weighing in on this film for its cynicism (it's at least partly an exercise in maintaining copyrights), its unfaithfulness to the old version, its wokery, its capacity to offend short people/Palestinians/Latinxes/princes, and the absurdity of some of the censor's warnings ('at one point a character is surrounded by ominous trees'), to the point where the fact that some of the first people to actually see it reported that it wasn't actually dreadful almost seems immaterial.

Still, you've got to make your film cut through somehow, if you want people to go and see it anyway. At least people do seem to be going to see films again in something like the same numbers that was the case before Covid; there was a biggish crowd for Mickey 17 last week, and another good turnout for the less obviously commercial new film from the British Asian director Karan Kandhari, Sister Midnight. (Though we must of course bear in mind that, given the two mainstream cinemas in my city have both closed in the last couple of years, it may just be the case that the same total audience is now concentrated in a smaller number of spaces.)

Sister Midnight is one of those tricksy films which seems to be perfectly aware of the idea of genre but doesn't necessarily feel the need to be bound by it. What starts off looking like a neo-realistic study of the tensions and problems in contemporary Indian society ends up as . . . something else. Something very much else, to be honest.

I have to say that here I find myself a little uncertain about how best to proceed. Obviously, we operate a fairly strict no-spoiler policy hereabouts, which basically means only things from the trailer or the first act of the movie are fair game, pretty much – I don't go around revealing that Bruce Willis is a sledge or Darth Vader is really Keyzer Soze. But when the trailer turns out to be deliberately. . . well, I don't want to say misleading, but that's probably the word we're looking for in this case. This is arguably a case of a film and director attempting to pull something of a fast one on the audience.

Skipping to the end for a moment, when I came out of the screening of Sister Midnight, I did think there an unusual number of people milling around in the foyer of the cinema, many of whom I recognised from the auditorium I'd just left. A couple of women were energetically agreeing that next time they were going to see a film about an animated cat, the subtext being that this promised to be a less rattling experience.

'Have you just been to see the film about the [spoiler redacted]?' I asked. Of course, they had, and while the flurry of opinion which followed was generally quite positive – words like 'original' and 'wild' featured prominently – I did detect a faint sense that they were aggrieved that it hadn't been quite the film they'd been led to expect.

Of course, this presents me with the problem of how to talk about the film intelligibly while respecting the choices of its makers to be quite so . . . selective? . . . devious? . . . mischievous? . . . in their advertising of it. So let's see how we get on. The bulk of the film is set in contemporary Mumbai. It opens with the arrival in the city of Uma (Radhika Apte), a woman from the countryside who has just participated in an arranged marriage with Gopal (Ashok Pathak) – the two of them haven't really seen each other since they were eight.

There is a great deal of awkwardness and embarrassment between the two newly-weds, with Gopal in particular seeming quite terrified. (There is a long dialogue-free section at the start of the film with Uma and Gopal simply not communicating with each other in any meaningful way.) The silence is eventually broken when Uma has had enough of her new husband's refusal to talk to or support her in any meaningful way. By no means the smallest problem is simply that she is bored all day, by herself in their tiny home.

Uma solves this problem, at least, by getting a job as a cleaner in an office block (this requires a punishingly lengthy commute), but there seems to be some deeper malaise afflicting her. She loses her appetite, has bouts of weakness and fainting. What on earth can be wrong with her? At least the other ladies of the neighbourhood have only nice things to say about her complexion.

And then the film goes off into the really quite unexpected territory I alluded to up the page. The film has always been a deadpan black comedy up to this point, and this continues until the end, but what has seemed to be a relatively grounded film about the lot of women in India today casts loose and ends up becoming . . . well, there are a lot of scenes with mops, an impressively accurate pastiche of Yojimbo, a mob carrying blazing torches and a small flock of animated goats, amongst other things.

I should say that, broadly speaking, it always makes sense on its own terms and I thought it was fascinating to watch. But your mileage may vary, because the kind of film it turns into is one which can be a bit polarising. What it all actually means is also left up for grabs – if there's some kind of metaphor in play here it is either incredibly obvious or so subtle and oblique to be bafflingly obscure. But the direction is consistently interesting, Radhika Apte gives a very funny performance, and there's an interesting soundtrack with a lot of definitively unexpected tunes on it from the likes of the Band, T-Rex and Motorhead.

I did enjoy it, but a lot of that may have been due to the way the film took me by surprise – if I'd known what to expect going in, and the film had been less bracingly startling, I think it might have seriously wound me up rather than entertaining me. Which is why I have been so wilfully obscure for the last 1,124 words. (You're welcome.) Try it, you might like it.

Also Streaming . . .

. . . the Russo brothers have a go at finally bankrupting Netflix with their gargantuanly-budgeted sci-fi romp The Electric State, sort of based on an 'illustrated novel'. In an alt-history 1990s where Walt Disney invented AI, robots are confined to a desert gulag in the aftermath of a war, while the human population sprawls in a VR coma courtesy of Stanley Tucci's tech mogul, whose first name begins with E and ends in N and whose second name has SK in it (subtle stuff, this). Troubled orphan Michelle (Millie Bobby Brown) is surprised when a robot turns up on her doorstep claiming to be her dead brother. They set off for the gulag to find out what's really happening, joining forces with Chris Pratt, who gives a greatest-hits style performance, on the way.

Not quite as weird or incoherent as it sounds, and you can certainly see where the money has gone, but still really overblown and indulgent considering how thin and derivative the story is – it's a bit like a cross between 2023's The Creator and The Muppet Show, heavily seasoned with bits from the Russos' Marvel movies (which, to be fair, are the pick of that particular crop). Nevertheless, it feels manipulative and sentimental, with the live actors' performances less impressive than those of the voice talent. The Russos handle the visuals and action well enough, but the script feels hollow – the question of whether Brown just isn't good at picking her projects or simply an actress of limited range remains open. Fairly watchable if you like special effects, though.

Awix

24.03.25 Front Page

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