Witch, Warrior, Woman: Radhika Apte Is Done Playing Nice

NDTV

21 hours ago

Radhika Apte is a phenomenon - an actor whose range, though often confined to the thematic corridors of thriller and horror, quietly defies the limitations imposed by the very industry that should champion her. Producers, in their calculative pursuit of replicable success, frequently funnel actors into familiar moulds, favoring the comfort of formulaic performances over the untamed potential of artistic exploration. It is a restriction not merely of roles but of artistic agency - an invisible cage that confines Radhika's desire to be as much a storyteller as an actor.
'I'm Tired Of Acting'
Apte discovered her flair for writing and directed a revered short film starring Gulshan Devaiah and Shahana Goswami called The Sleepwalkers (2020). An interview with The Indian Express, in which she confesse, 'I'm tired of acting because you don't necessarily get the kind of work you want', reveals a quiet artistic weariness. Her decision to be 'a little choosy' with her projects stands as a delicate assertion of self amid an industry rife with compromise. Within the tension between this imposed limitation and her intrinsic versatility, though, lies her stellar cinematic journey. It is an eloquent paradox: Radhika's work, often celebrated for its layered gravitas, simultaneously reflects a silence about what else could she be.
Though undeniably fluent in a wide spectrum of genres, Apte possesses an uncanny command over horror. Her haunting gravitation toward roles that blur the boundary between the supernatural and the psychologically unhinged is unmistakable. Sister Midnight (2024), which is her most recent BAFTA nominated exploration, Phobia (2016), and even an eerie short film like Ahalya (2015) come to mind when one first thinks about this premise. But there are many more commendable, less-talked-about performances that deserve applause.
A Woman, In Full
At the centre of each performance is a woman on the cusp of reality - shaped by trauma, repression, or forces that defy explanation. Apte, with her instinctive intelligence and intuitive restraint, becomes a vessel for the spectral and the unstable, consistently embodying women who are either haunted or labelled mad - often both. This raises a broader inquiry into how Indian cinema chooses to render female rage, hysteria, and resistance: frequently through horror, myth, and psychological dissolution. Films like Stree (2018), Bulbbul (2020), and Pari (2018) suggest that a woman must either go mad or transcend nature to be heard. And what truly liberates them from having to suppress that madness at all?
Despite her acclaimed performances in Shor In The City (2010), Lust Stories (2018), and Andhadhun (2018), my very first encounter with Radhika Apte's spellbinding presence was, quite fittingly during film school, through Sujoy Ghosh's mythological short Ahalya (2015). Apte's performance brilliantly subverts the familiar tale from the Ramayana. Traditionally, Ahalya is deceived by Indra, who disguises himself as her husband and is subsequently punished by Maharshi Gautama for infidelity. Apte's Ahalya is presented almost as a honeytrap - enigmatic, watchful, and in control. Though, the story's modern lens, entwined with mythology, supernatural forces and magical realism grants her character autonomy. Here, Ahalya is not merely a cautionary tale but a quiet force, one who turns the gaze back on the men, making them suffer the consequences of their own unchecked desire.
As for Karan Kandhari's Sister Midnight (2024), it is luminous in parts that allow Apte to embrace the unhinged, unregulated and undeterred sense of what it means to surpass being an individual confined in societal boxes of decency and compliance. Though, it is surely a film that feels like a cinephile made it, due to its extremely self-indulgent nature. Sister Midnight isn't really interested in telling a story but rather in consolidating an experience, sort of like an extended metaphor for its entire run time. It doesn't want to explain but reveal Apte as a visceral entity.
Similarly, in Shirish Kunder's Kriti (2016), Apte plays Kalpana, Sapan's (Manoj Bajpayee) psychiatrist - though that is a truth only halfway learnt. She is carefully concerned with his girlfriend Kriti's agoraphobia, discussing it with an eerie professional calm. At first, it is presumed she is on Sapan's side, shepherding him through the fog of his inner labyrinth, guiding him toward recovery. But she is the fog. The film's illusion relies on our trust in her rationality, only to unravel it as the real distortion. ' Sapan ', meaning dream, and ' Kalpana ', meaning imaginary - two impossibilities trying to out-invent each other. Together, through a darkly twisted ballet, they eliminate any external force attempting to rupture the fantasy. Rather than Sapan being the creator of Kalpana, Kriti posits her as the orchestrator of his descent.
In Pavan Kirpalani's Phobia (2016), Apte herself plays a patient of agoraphobia as Mehek who suffers abuse at the hands of a taxi driver late at night. Sifting empathetically through the unruly terrain of a mental illness, Phobia attempts to humanise anxiety and fear as indicators of the inner subconscious, often serving as a mirror to a lived reality that others cannot perceive. Through various men attempting to eavesdrop and make a move on her, she emerges as a survivor - someone who makes it out by repeatedly reclaiming control over her life, guided by an instinctive and almost premonitional clarity.
A Woman Done With Definitions
Anurag Kashyap's Clean Shaven is not of the horror or thriller genre, yet one can classify it as a psychological examination of a repressed woman and of how women rarely have control over decisions about their bodies, whether aesthetically, sexually or biologically. Apte plays Archana, a housewife and mother entrenched in an unequal and conservative marriage. Her friendship with the younger Allwyn (Adarsh Gourav), hormonally charged yet emotionally shallow, becomes a mirror of her own stifled desire. He is digitally literate in lust but naïve in empathy, while she, bound by years of suppression, dares to disturb the script written for her. Apte embodies a woman done with men defining her body - whether through a hypersexualised lens, like how Allwyn sees women, or a quietly controlling one like her husband's.
Kashyap films her in a space that doubles as a metaphor: a birdcage balcony framing Archana as a golden bird, only to be admired from afar, but never free. She's trapped in her house as she was in Phobia, but here, the imprisonment is of the mind born out of very real societal dangers. And to get out of her house is to escape the dangerous man who wants otherwise. In Kashyap's That Day After Everyday (2013), too, simply stepping out of the building to go to work is a battleground. Men lurk in packs, entitlement stitched into their shadows, while families - mirrors of the same rot - deflect blame onto the women themselves. Yet again, Apte resists, satisfyingly beating them up once and for all. The terror that confines her becomes the very thing she learns to navigate or even weaponise.
The Meaning Of Nationalism
In Netflix's mini-series Ghoul (2018), Apte's Nida begins as a devout lieutenant officer, disillusioned by the belief that turning in her father for housing subversive literature and 'anti-national' thoughts is an act of national loyalty. What unfolds is a disintegration of that borrowed conviction. Nida comes face to face with the institution's underbelly - and something darker still. The ghoul is a supernatural creature summoned by Nida's father, not out of vengeance but resistance. In this grim theatre of nationalism gone rogue, the ghoul becomes a proxy for justice when no other form is possible. When the officers imprison Nida, branding her a terrorist's daughter who turned out just like him, the insult becomes inheritance. The very monster they tried to contain now possesses her - part inheritance, part choice. It is less a haunting and more a reclamation. She becomes what the system fears the most: conscience with consequence. In Apte's hands, this transformation is neither heroic nor tragic, but inevitable.
In most of her works, Apte seems to be sometimes intermingling with and sometimes running away from the psychologically disturbing or the supernatural. But in Sister Midnight, she allows herself to be wholly consumed by the madness of being forced to fit in - whether through type-casted roles in a film or a person inhabiting societal constraints. The film becomes a mirror to the inner disjointedness one feels living in Mumbai, where chaos is both external and internal, and where the self fractures not from ghosts, but from the pressure of cohesion.
Claiming Her Story
After so many of these roles, perhaps Apte can begin to reclaim her narrative. Not by resisting what has been, but by shaping what will be. She's arrived at a moment where she can act in the kind of projects she truly wants to and write in whichever genre she pleases. Per a recent report, Apte is all set to make her much-anticipated action-fantasy directorial debut with Koyta, which will be produced by Vikramaditya Motwane.
While progress brings more women on sets, the industry remains unaccommodating for them. Apte highlights the tension between evolving representation and systemic barriers, underscoring a quiet insistence to reshape storytelling spaces where women's voices can emerge fully, unapologetically, and on their own terms.
(The author is a documentary filmmaker and an entertainment writer based in Mumbai.)