Mark Reviews Movies: IMPETIGORE

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Review by Mark Dujsik | July 22, 2020

Joko Anwar's Impetigore is an unapologetically nasty film. It is, relatively speaking, not particularly bloody or gory, even if the title, a portmanteau that references a contagious skin infection, seems to suggest otherwise. When characters do bleed here, they do so profusely, but the sight of multiple throat-slashings and an almost classy massacre, shown behind the translucent screen of a shadow puppet performance, are nothing compared to the implications of what we don't or just barely see.

From its opening scene, featuring an intense build-up of suspense inside the tight quarters of a tollbooth, the film displays Anwar's skill at creating and then sustaining tension, even—and especially—when he lets us see what's coming. In that prologue, Maya (Tara Basro) is working the night shift, collecting tolls on a barely used highway, somewhere in Indonesia, from within the confines of a cubicle.

She's chatting away on the phone with her best friend Dini (Marissa Anita), who's working in the booth next to hers. The conversation is mostly trivial—about phone coverage and how the highway is about to become free—until Maya mentions a creepy guy who passes through her lane multiple times a day.

She spots a familiar car. It's the man. He pulls up and stares at her. Maya tells him to leave, and then he asks if she's from a particular village. The stare, an eerie combination of determination and lifelessness, continues, but a truck behind the car seems to save Maya from the moment. Then, she sees that the man has parked ahead on the side of the road.

To reveal more would ruin the surprise of the scene, and indeed, it's difficult to determine how much of this story is too much to give away. There is the undeniable craft of Anwar's filmmaking, which makes even the most obvious moments of suspense here remain strong, but there's also the genuine shock of how far his screenplay takes the horrifying details of this tale.

A few months after the incident on the highway, Maya and Dini are selling knock-off clothes at market and not having much success in their new business venture. Maya, who did originally come from the village the creepy guy at the tollbooth had mentioned, has a new plan. After finding some old photos of her late parents, Maya notices the large family home in the only photograph that includes her. The house could be her inheritance. Selling it might give her and Dini enough capital to start a proper business.

A trip to the village is in order. Even before the two friends arrive there, it's clear that there's something wrong with the place. There are no easy roads to it. One carriage driver in the village near the bus stop has never heard of it. It's not to be found on any online map, although the government insists that the village exists. Another driver has heard of the place but only agrees to take them for a considerable fee. Then there's the matter of three little girls, whom Maya spotted twice on the bus ride—somehow getting ahead of the bus after the first sighting.

The rest of the story unfolds as a multi-layered mystery, having to do with Maya's past, the history of this village, the fact that the family mansion has been abandoned all this time, the villagers' daily procession to the cemetery, and the presence of so many tiny gravestones there—marked with dates to denote newborns and possessing no names. Like everyone else in the village, Ki Saptadi (Ario Bayu), the village elder, is uninterested in the visitors, and his mother Nyi Misni (Christine Hakim) is ready to dismiss them, until they lie about being college students interested in writing about his mastery of shadow puppetry. Dini is convinced the charade of being students is unimpeachable. "Nobody kills college students," she notes without a hint of sarcasm.

There is plenty of killing in the proceeding story, as well as during flashbacks that tell conflicting accounts of carnage caused by and resulting in a supposed curse. It is, of course, convoluted nonsense involving restless ghosts and a plague cast down upon new members of the village, but that's not the point. Anwar treats it all sincerely, because, at first, the villagers believe in it, act upon it, and are doomed to death misery on account of it—whether it's real or just superstition. The shock here is in what Ki and his underlings do when, for example, they attend every birth in the village. The horror is in how Anwar takes his time with such a scene, observing the parents' ordinary concern about the birth of a child turning into fear, dread, and, finally, devastation.

Anwar creates a constant feeling of unease throughout more traditional sequences, such as things going bump in the night at the mansion, and especially as helpless people are forced to endure the consequences of empty belief in the supernatural or a genuine curse. Considering what happens as the story reveals the terrible reality of what Ki and others are willing to do, there is surprising restraint on Anwar's part. Most of the violence is either obscured or suggested—such as when we see the mother hang something on a clothesline, realizing what it is and, then, what happened.

Even as a more mystical side to the tale threatens to undermine the real horrors here, Impetigore remains eerie and unpredictable. This is a tough, discomforting film, and it's obvious that Anwar would have it no other way.

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