2019, Joko Anwar (Satan's Slaves) -- download
I found our previous Joko Anwar movie (Satan's Slaves) a decent watch, but nothing really stuck with me. That said, it amuses me how very few of our 31 Days... movies stick with me. Some are faint memories, usually a scene or two embedded in the brain pan, but some I literally recall nothing, not even after reading my own posts. I suspect it is related to how stressed I was at the time of the viewing. All I remember of Anwar's previous movie was a weird inner-house well that the child in the movie kept on gravitating towards. The horror? Not so much.
Impetigore brings back lead Tara Basro as Maya, a toll booth operator, along with her best friend Dini (Marissa Anita, Gundala). Maya is attacked by a man with a machete (or the Indonesian equivalent of a large blade) who recognizes her. She knows very little about her past, but that she came from a small village when she was a child. She decides that the village the attacker mentioned might indeed be her home, and she has a childhood photo of her standing in front of an old house. Could she have a wealthy background she can claim? The two girls are barely getting by, maybe having abandoned the toll booths after the attack. They decide to take the long bus ride to the village to see what is what.
To say the village is remote is an under statement. The only "taxi driver" (if by taxi, you mean donkey cart) who knows where it is charges an exorbitant amount, and the ride, goes over roads not gravel, not paved, but barely cart tracks. But in a small village, which is obviously very rural (from what I can guess about Indonesian standards), they find her house from the photo, an obvious sign of wealth considering its architecture and size. She must have come from wealth, but why is it now abandoned?
Of course, the village is creepy. The girls are squatting in the house, avoiding revealing who they are until they figure out what went on with her family. And we keep on getting weird ghostly visions in the background, so we know something supernatural is up. After a bit of setup, things get really rolling. Unfortunately.
Like the other movie, there are a lot of layers to this story. The village is under a curse, a curse where all the children for the last 10 years or so are born disfigured, and have to be quickly drowned. They are born without skin, and not expected to live long. The curse came from Maya's family, a rich man who was said to have murdered three local girls and eventually gone mad, murdering his staff before being taken down by the son of his housekeeper. The locals believe that they can lift the curse by killing the rich man's daughter, for the curse was tied to her being healed by the evil acts. Yes, Maya had been born without skin, and her father cast evil spells to ... grow her skin? We find out this when Dini mistakenly pretends to be the long lost daughter. That lie ends her life tragically. The movie has done a great job building the relationship between the two girls and this is a fucking tragic death. But of course, the daughter is Maya, and she's very alive.
The ties to family, the dedications and obligations are tightly tied to the horror in this movie. All the horrific acts come down to what people are willing to do to save their own families. So much evil is performed here in that dedication. When all is revealed to Maya, strangely by the ghosts of the three original murdered little girls, she learns what she has to do to lift the curse. The evil acts have to be closed, all of them, and not just the ones they villagers were aware of.
I was more invested in this movie than Anwar's last. Maybe it was the better establishment of characters and the lack of Christian mythos, but I enjoyed the tension and the reveals and the actual horrors committed by people outweighed any of the supernatural elements. I am curious to see what tale he will tackle next.
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