Karan Kandhari is worth following for his difficult outsiders and physical comedy. He gives an actor such as Radhika Apte room to hold our attention, though his appetite for strange images can pull him away from her.
Fi1m perspective
Radhika Apte's physical comedy in Sister Midnight (2024) gives us a woman who need not be pleasant to hold our attention. As Uma, she is difficult company, and Kandhari does not keep interrupting to explain why we should like her. We warmed to her because Apte makes her awkwardness funny without smoothing it away. Kandhari is worth following for that willingness to let a character remain troublesome, even when his storytelling gives us reasons to lose patience.
Before the feature, he made the United Howl trilogy of shorts about misfits. Hard Hat (2009) follows immigrants on a London building site; Flight of the Pompadour (2012) puts a lonely teenager in a rockabilly club. Sidney (2013) concerns a lonely handyman. Sister Midnight brings that interest in people who do not fit to an ill-suited arranged marriage in Mumbai. The move to a longer story gives him more space for dark comedy, but also more opportunity to lose sight of his central character.
The strange images are carefully prepared: Kandhari storyboards, plans precisely and favours film stock with economical coverage. His collaborators include cinematographer Sverre Sørdal, composer Paul Banks and music supervisor Kle Savidge. Music matters to his method, with punk, blues and folk set against images rather than used simply to tell us how to feel. That reluctance to spell everything out also serves the comedy in Sister Midnight, where an uncomfortable feeling is allowed to survive the joke. The trouble begins when the next visual idea takes priority over what Uma might do.
Apte holds our interest through the uneven storytelling, and Chhaya Kadam's Sheetal offers another welcome human presence. Kandhari deserves credit for committing to the stranger parts of Sister Midnight, even if they sometimes make Uma harder to understand without making her more interesting. We would not ask him to make her more agreeable or account for every eccentricity. We would like him to stay with her longer before looking elsewhere for something remarkable. Give Sister Midnight an evening if physical comedy appeals more than a tidy story.
Biography
Karan Kandhari is a British-Indian film director and writer. Born in Kuwait, he lives in London. His feature debut Sister Midnight (2024), which he also wrote, premiered in the Directors' Fortnight section of the 2024 Cannes Film Festival.
Kandhari has directed several short films, including Bye Bye Miss Goodnight (2005) and Hard Hat (2009). He has also directed music videos. Sister Midnight received a nomination for Outstanding Debut by a British Writer, Director or Producer at the 2025 BAFTA Film Awards.
