Radhika Apte is terrific as a woman preparing to settle down with a shiftless husband she barely knows when her world goes awry

British-Indian film-maker Karan Kandhari makes a stylish and offbeat feature debut with a black-comic horror set in Mumbai, elegantly shot by Sverre Sørdal and designed by Shruti Gupte – and if it runs out of road a bit before the end, and can’t quite decide what the point of everything has been … well, we’ve had a lot of laugh-lines, shocks and ingenious sight gags along the way. With its deadpan drollery and rectilinear tableau scenes, Sister Midnight takes something from Wes Anderson and Jim Jarmusch and also – at its most alarming – something more from Polanski’s Repulsion.

The movie’s satirical theme is the horror of arranged marriage, or maybe the intimate horror of marriage full stop – the feeling of being trapped, of suddenly and mysteriously not knowing who or what your partner is, the delirious fear and hate that can boil up out of nowhere for your spouse and yourself. Radhika Apte plays Uma, a woman who has arrived in Mumbai to start life as a housewife after an arranged marriage, the groom having gone on ahead to where he has already established himself in what is to be their modest marital home. (Apte also played an arranged bride in Michael Winterbottom’s The Wedding Guest) The wedding itself has evidently already taken place, and her husband is Gopal (Ashok Pathak), an unprepossessing guy from her home village with whom she hasn’t really spoken since they were both children, and who now spends his leisure hours at home loafing around, not talking to his wife, watching TV and masturbating. “You used to be so sensitive!” complains Uma. “I was eight,” replies Gopal.

Geoffrey Rush’s retired judge is terrorised by Lithgow’s therapy puppet-wielding fellow resident in this claustrophobic tale of elder-on-elder abuse

Film-maker James Ashcroft has created a scary and intimately upsetting psychological horror based on a story by New Zealand author Owen Marshall set in a care home, a film whose coolly maintained claustrophobic mood and bravura performances make up for the slight narrative blurring towards the end. It’s a movie about bullying and elder abuse – more specifically, elder-on-elder abuse – and it is always most chilling when it sticks to the realist constraints of what could actually happen.

The locale is an un-luxurious residential care facility where a retired judge is now astonished to find himself; this is Stefan Mortensen, played by Geoffrey Rush, who succumbed to a catastrophic stroke while passing judgment from the bench. He is a cantankerous and high-handed man, furious to be in this demeaning place and who, like many there, assures himself it isn’t for long. Mortensen has to share a room with Tony Garfield (George Henare), a retired rugby star whose career fizzled out. These men are terrorised by long-term patient Dave Crealy, played with true hideousness by John Lithgow, a racist bully who convinces the care staff he is a gentle, harmless soul by exaggerating his mental and physical decay, but tyrannises patients behind officialdom’s back with his therapy hand puppet named Jenny Pen, making the bewildered and terrified patients submit to her “rule”.