IMPETIGORE (2019 - Indonesian)

Studio:      Shudder
Director:    Joko Anwar
Writer:      Joko Anwar
Producer:  Shanty Harmayn, Tia Hasibuan, Aoura Lovenson Chandra, Ben Soebiakto
Stars:     Tara Basro, Ario Bayu, Marissa Anita, Christine Hakim, Asmara Abigail, Kiki Narendra, Abdurrahman Arif, Zidni Hakim, Teuku Rifnu, Muhammad Abe

Review Score:

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Summary:

After a deranged man attempts to kill her, a young woman goes in search of her true birth history that connects a secluded Indonesian village to a terrible curse.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

Maya talks to her best friend and fellow tollbooth attendant Dini over the phone while they work the night shift at different locations. An unsettling man who has been stalking her for days approaches Maya. The man asks if Maya is Rahayu from Harjosari Village in Mandiraja. Muttering cryptically about breaking a curse, the man attacks Maya with a machete and cuts at a scar on her leg. Police gun down the man before he can kill Maya.

Maya and Dini open a struggling clothing business. Based on a lone photo depicting her with wealthy parents as well as what her attacker said, Maya decides to track down her birth family. Dini accompanies Maya in hopes of discovering an inheritance.

Maya finds a small scroll inside the scar on her leg. Someone later translates the ancient Javanese writing as a spell to protect its carrier from evil spirits.

On the long bus ride toward the remote village, Maya sees the ghosts of three young girls by the side of the road. Carriage driver Nano takes Maya and Dini the rest of the way and gives the women his card to contact him again.

Posing as students conducting research, Maya and Dini try to see village elder Ki Saptadi, who is also a renowned shadow puppeteer. Saptadi’s mother Nyi Misni tells the women to return the next day. Maya and Dini stay in the abandoned house that previously belonged to Maya’s true parents Ki Donowongso and Nyai Shinta.

Maya and Dini see the villagers conducting a funeral. They also visit the graves of Maya’s parents and find dozens of burial plots devoted to infants.

Villagers gather during the night when a pregnant woman goes into labor. Ki Saptadi drowns the infant moments after it is born. Dini gets a strange feeling about the village when she and Maya see everyone holding another funeral the next day.

Maya buys food from a villager named Ratih. Maya asks about the old house. Speaking in Javanese, Ratih’s great-grandmother claims devils lived in the house and left a horrible disease.

While Maya is away, two village men come to the house to tell Dini they cannot stay there. When Dini asks why, the men say it belongs to Ki Donowongso’s heir Rahayu. Dini claims she is Rahayu. The two men capture Dini.

Nyi Misni finds Ki Saptadi and the two men preparing to ritualistically kill Dini. Advising that two more women are going into labor soon and they may not have enough time to save the babies, Nyi Misni simply slits Dini’s throat. Nyi Misni then skins Dini’s corpse.

While searching for Dini, Maya finds Ki Saptadi performing a puppet show. One of the ghost girls leads Maya to a house where Maya secretly spies a woman going into labor. Maya becomes horrified when she sees Ki Saptadi drowning the baby after it is born. The baby’s father chides Ki Saptadi because he promised his child would be born healthy. Another pregnant woman wonders if her child will still be cursed too.

Ratih helps Maya sneak away from the scene. Ratih tells Maya how the village came to be cursed 20 years ago.

Ki Saptadi’s mother Nyi Misni was a servant of previous village elder Ki Donowongso’s father. Ki Donowongso, who was also a master puppeteer, inherited the family’s wealth when his father died. Ki Donowongso married Nyai Shinta, but she was unable to bear him a child. Nyai Shinta finally gave birth five years into the marriage, but their daughter Rahayu was born without skin, so villagers were not allowed to see her.

Shortly after three young girls went missing, villagers finally saw Rahayu for the first time and she had skin. A rumor started that Ki Donowongso had something to do with the missing children. Ki Saptadi claimed Ki Donowongso made a pact with the devil to protect his daughter. Ki Donowongso soon went mad and slaughtered a group of villagers before cutting his own throat.

A loyal servant took Rahayu to the city, but the village was cursed to have its babies born without skin. Tole was the only child who wasn’t killed, and he now lives in constant pain in the forest. Ki Saptadi told everyone that to lift the curse, Rahayu must be skinned and her flesh made into leather puppets.

Ratih reveals she is pregnant. Ratih identifies her husband in a photo. Maya sees Ratih’s husband is the man who attacked her. Ratih tells Maya that her great-grandmother said a curse cannot be lifted, only transformed, which is why Ratih doesn’t believe in killing Maya and instead wants to help her hide.

Maya calls Nano for help. Nano comes to the village, but villagers murder him.

The three ghost girls appear to Maya during an unsuccessful escape attempt. Flashbacks that the ghosts induce reveal Ki Saptadi had a secret affair with Nyai Shinta, making him Rahayu’s real father. When Nyi Misni disappointedly discovered what her son had done, she used occult magic to make him forget and to create the curse. Ki Donowongso killed the three girls, used occult magic to give Rahayu/Maya skin, and also sewed the scroll into Maya’s thigh. However, Ki Saptadi impersonated Ki Donowongso, slaughtered numerous villagers as well as Nyai Shinta, and staged Ki Donowongso’s suicide to make him seem insane. The ghosts tell Maya she must bury the puppets that were made from their skin with their bones to lift the curse.

After a brief encounter with Tole, Maya recovers the puppets. Maya and Ratih bury the puppets with the bones of the girls.

Realizing they killed the wrong woman, Nyi Misni leads the villagers on a hunt for Maya. Nyi Misni reveals she was a mistress of Ki Donowongso’s father and Ki Saptadi is actually the first elder’s illegitimate son. The villagers capture Maya.

As Ki Saptadi prepares to ritualistically slaughter her in front of the village, Maya insists she broke the curse by following the ghosts’ instructions to bury their former flesh with their bones. She also tells Ki Saptadi she is actually his daughter.

Realizing his mother caused the curse, Ki Saptadi demands the truth from Nyi Misni. Nyi Misni puts a knife to her throat and threatens to kill herself if Ki Saptadi doesn’t kill Maya.

The remaining pregnant woman gives birth to a healthy baby, proving Maya corrected the curse. Grabbing his mother’s hand, Ki Saptadi uses her knife to cut his own throat. Distraught over her son’s death, Nyi Misni kills herself the same way.

Ratih frees Maya. Maya flees the village on a passing produce truck.

One year later, a pregnant villager happily prepares to birth a healthy baby. Unexpectedly, Nyi Misni’s ghost tears the child from the woman’s womb and eats it.

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Review:

Put yourself in Maya’s shoes. Now picture the sheer terror of being in her predicament.

Working a night shift alone as a tollbooth attendant on a remote road, Maya has her best friend Dini on the phone to keep her company. She also has an unsettling stalker who has been tailing her for several days. Tonight, the mystery man makes his move. Washed in the blood red glow of taillights and ‘Do Not Enter’ signs, the man asks Maya if she is actually a girl named Rahayu from Harjosari Village. Maya doesn’t know what to make of the man’s muttering. After a calm trip to his car’s trunk, the man returns to Maya. This time he wields a machete.

Maya makes a break for it when her tiny tollbooth ceases to offer the security of an impromptu panic room. Music mounts to match the pace’s accelerating pulse. Maya hits the ground. The attacker straddles her with his blade raised high. Police come to the rescue without a second to spare, though the man still leaves a wound on the leg where Maya already bears a strange scar. Meanwhile, “Impetigore” makes a mark with this nail-biting prologue, ringing an unnerving bell that continues humming for the remainder of the runtime.

“Impetigore” isn’t all about harrowing heartbeats and disturbingly gruesome sights. Much of it is, but not all. Thanks to Maya’s casually caustic pal Dini, comic relief remembers to prick bullfrogging tension every now and again with snide humor. Dini is that funny film friend whose personality forms from sarcasm and sass. She also clearly cares a great deal about her BFF, because she’s willing to hold her bladder on a six-hour bus ride, pay 1,000 rupiah per person to ride in a rickety horse-drawn carriage, and sleep inside a dusty old house to help Maya uncover the truth about her heritage.

It’s not just her attacker’s weird words. A lone photograph of Maya with her birth parents compels her to seek out Harjosari Village to find out who she really is, as well as why someone would want to murder her. So she and Dini make the long trek into the country hoping to find some new clue about Maya’s former family.

It’s probably because I recently replayed “Resident Evil 4” that Harjosari vaguely reminds me of the Capcom classic’s El Pueblo. Other video game vibes include Sony’s “Siren” spiced with some occult overtones transposed from “Silent Hill.” Slow-rolling fog passes in front of thatched roof hovels. Grime-covered farm workers stare scarily at outsiders from the city. Harjosari exists in a hazy layer between a vintage Universal Monsters hamlet and a contemporary country corner off the beaten path. Secrets seemingly simmer beneath every dirty surface, and you just know rescue won’t be quick to come should the town’s creepy cabal decide to make you disappear to a dark dungeon somewhere.

It’s definitely because writer/director Joko Anwar is at the helm that “Impetigore” oozes this ancient evil. Anwar has put a hand in just about every category of cinema from drama to rom-com to superheroes. But his two feature film forays into fright, 2017’s “Satan’s Slaves” (review here) and now “Impetigore,” have pulled out his chair at the table any time the horror genre discusses promising modern maestros.

Joko Anwar shows a translatable fascination for family-related fears like those seen in the insidious suburbias depicted in Nicholas McCarthy movies such as “The Pact” (review here). Anwar takes classic clays like haunted houses, cemetery settings, and vengeful ghosts and shapes them with a slick eye seasoned by years of consuming popular culture based on these tropes. The way he applies sharp editing, color, and rattling music to make them pop with freshness demonstrates an understanding of reinvention and simple filmmaking fun similar to styles employed by Ti West, James Wan, and Mike Flanagan. Even when Joko Anwar digs into well-trod soil, his shovel shines with the sheen of a reverential appreciator who is as much of a fan as he is a provocative puppeteer of skin-crawling horror.

A more progressive touch wouldn’t be unwelcome. Call it a case of cultural difference that’s perhaps a product of the fiction’s time and place, but several sexist undercurrents make the tide choppy, particularly with regard to threatening rape and glibly addressing promiscuity.

While we’re touching on potentially problematic triggers, the horror that butters the movie’s bread may be overly bleak for easily sickened sensibilities. Drowned infants, flayed skin, and brutally butchered children play key roles in the film’s frightening fiction. “Impetigore” rarely dares to get more graphic than required, often dollying close to a wall to depict certain instances of slaughter in silhouette or through other creative means. Squeamish stomachs should nevertheless brace their bowels accordingly.

Lastly, “Impetigore” piles on exposition like corned beef on Canter’s Deli rye. It comes clunkily too, served in fatty slabs of flashbacks perfectly positioned for when the script needs a deus ex machina method of jumping to the next plot point. This presents more of a problem to people who “hate reading movies.” “Impetigore” needs a lot of words to set its various stages, which in turn necessitates subtitles coming fast and furiously.

Yet for those who choose to stay in step with the story after overlooking a few questionably convenient conceits, “Impetigore” packs in plenty of satanic shocks to complement its exploration of terrifying tone. It’s a movie whose punctuations of action match the macabre mood, creating and sustaining teeth-clenching suspense. Joko Anwar has some edges to trim in terms of taking storytelling shortcuts and tacking too many minutes onto a movie. Despite all that, he still stays in the center of the road on his path to becoming, if not already being, a top talent in horror.

NOTE: The film’s Indonesian title is “Perempuan Tanah Jahanam.”

Review Score: 80

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