Impetigore (2019)

directed by Joko Anwar

Indonesia

106 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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I let Joko Anwar's presence as writer-director of this film lead me to believe I knew what it would be like before I even watched it. That, and the fact that probably the most recognizable names in Indonesian horror (Joko Anwar, Kimo Stamboel, and Timoh Tjahjanto) make extremely gory, over-the-top films. Whatever the reason, I assumed Impetigore would be an eventual gorefest, hence the title. I did not expect it to be so restrained and to feel so full of depth and meaning. There is more than enough gore to satisfy anyone who might be looking for that kind of thing, but the film itself is not pre-occupied with how much blood it can spill.

This was Indonesia's submission for the 2021 Academy Awards, and already they were taking a risk submitting any kind of genre movie at all, given the Academy's historical record of snubbing horror films. Then you add in the impossible-to-have-foreseen current state of the Academy Awards now that films can no longer be released in 2020 the way they used to be when Impetigore was made, and you've got a scenario in which it seems very difficult for this movie to get any recognition at all. But it more than deserves it.

Impetigore starts off on such a strong note that it instantly gets you sucked in, even though what happens at the beginning seems to have little to do with the rest of the film until a good way in when it's all explained. It's like a mini horror movie in itself: the main character is bored at her job as a toll booth operator, chatting on the phone with her friend (also a toll booth operator) and complaining about a certain guy who keeps showing up and acting creepy. The guy shows up again while she's on the phone, of course, and this time he gets out of his car with an enormous machete while she's trapped inside the booth with nowhere to go. This is all executed so well and with such a lack of histrionics that it's borderline uncomfortable to watch. There's no dramatic camera angles or sudden musical stings when we see the man start coming towards her, silhouetted with the long knife held out to one side. The moment when he goes back to his car and then returns with a weapon makes your blood run cold. Tara Basro's acting and the confinement of her character in the booth while an unknown malicious presence advances towards her are enough to create tension and terror all on their own.

And the rest of the film continues to be surprisingly low-key until it's necessary to ramp up. Again, this is not what I was expecting. I've been conditioned to see Indonesian horror as extreme, sadistic, envelope-pushing. There is quite a lot that goes on in Impetigore that is disturbing in a way that stands out against even what I would consider extreme for American horror, and it's made more potent by the way it's presented in this film, but the story always felt like it came first. This is as much a scary story as it is a scary film visually. While moments (a certain scene with a clothesline felt like a solid punch to the chest) utilize violence and gore, the balance is always kept between horrifying implications and horrifying reality.

I'm always a little suspicious of any horror movie that sets itself up by having people from the city travel to a rural, secluded village and experience traditions that seem strange to their city-dwelling tastes, because I feel like depicting rituals and legends as creepy and backwards is inherently harmful and I see it a lot, not just in international film but also in the glut of backwoods/Appalachian horror that plagues the U.S. (or else Wrong Turn wouldn't have about eight billion sequels and a successful reboot currently in theaters). But Impetigore does this really, really well. The village itself feels like it's presented as very neutral, and the emphasis is always on the actions of individual people rather than the place as a whole or the rituals that they perform. The underlying message of the story, really, is that the evil deeds of one man who holds power can have a ripple effect until every single person who he rules over is helpless to do anything but become complicit in his schemes, or die. I was very excited to see a movie where gamelan and wayang play a big role, and now I'm even more excited that neither of those things were presented as weird, sinister backwoods black magic rituals performed by crazy natives. It's just the badness of one man that seeps into what was otherwise a normal village and corrupts everything that they do.

Everything that happens in this movie just feels like it has such weight to it. It feels like a curse. It's not like, say, Ouija movies, or movies where somebody finds a cursed doll, stuff like that where the implication is that any innocent person could stumble upon an evil object and become the target of bad spirits. The main character of Impetigore is marked from the beginning. The horror comes from the fear that you might not be able to escape your bloodline. A shadow is over her from before the start of the film. The man with the machete is the inexorable pull of her fate looming over her all throughout the story. The Oscars haven't meant squat for some time, if they ever did, but I do hope this gets some recognition.