January 2 - Impetigore

 

            A young woman struggling to make it in the big city, Maya is working as a toll booth attendee when a mysterious man comes to visit her. He calls her by a different name, Rahayu, and asks about her home village and father before trying to kill her with a machete. Months later, Maya has started a struggling clothing business with her best friend Dini, but can’t get the memory of the attack out of her head. When she finds a picture of herself with her parents in front of a lavish house, she thinks her family’s wealth may be the solution to her financial woes and, with Dini in tow, heads to her village to claim what’s hers. Her inheritance turns out to be a lot more than a grand house and a plot of land.

            Released in its native Indonesia in 2019, Impetigore found its ways to the states via Shudder in 2020, so I’m counting it among 2020’s new releases. And Impetigore is catnip to an American horror fan eager to explore international offerings, combining western influences (including a direct homage to TCM’s iconic final scene) with Indonesian culture – lore of vengeful ghosts and curses, the traditional art of wayang kulit shadow-puppetry, and the location of a rural village contrasting with Maya’s city life.

            There are two movies within Impetigore. There’s the mystery of Maya exploring the village trying to figure out what’s going on, which is full of nightmarish imagery as Maya and the audience get glimpses of the village’s dark secret. Then there’s the backstory, revealed in flashback and character reveals in the final act, which has the shape of a family melodrama, full of illegitimate children and throat-slitting. The two are complementary, even if I preferred the first and felt ambivalent about how neatly the latter explained the former. It’s nice to see a horror movie that bothers to explain its mystery, but the thorough explanation we get to the nightmare that precedes it makes everything feel a little too contained. So while the ending echoes the uncontained terror of TCM, I don’t really feel the same dread.

            Part of this is the moral ambiguity of the characters, which I liked. It’s possible to sympathize both with Maya as she fights for her life and the villagers. Caught in the ripples of a curse, no one is acting out of evil or malice but out of earnest desperation. The curse does turn out to have an originator, who began the curse before Maya was even born, and as if to compensate for the other character’s moral ambiguity, this figure ends up being cartoonishly ill-intentioned. It feels a little stereotypical and cheap in a movie that is otherwise so well-constructed. But while this reveal was disappointing, it doesn’t undermine the genuine scares and delights of the rest of the film. While this film never completely surprised me, it did feel original, a supremely well-executed town-with-a-secret story with its own contributions to horror’s bag of tricks.

The Talent: Joko Anwar is a prolific Indonesian director who’s made everything from rom-coms to superhero movies, but he’s probably best known to western audiences for his horror film Satan’s Slaves, which has a reputation among horror fans as Very Scary. It also stars actress Tara Basro, who portrays Maya here.

Subgenre: Folk horror, some vengeful ghosts for good measure

Story Types / Archetypes: Town-with-a-secret, curse with ripple effects

Sense of Place: The movie spends a lot of time letting us explore the eerie village, with its ramshackle houses, its cemetery, and the dusty abode of Maya’s parents.

Mood: Ominous anticipation, with something nasty around every corner

Are there heroes?: I loved Maya as a main character; she begins the movie hustling to get by and is only interested in claiming her inheritance. She and Dini are ride or die besties, and have some charming banter. As the movie ramps up the horror, Maya becomes a bit more, shall we say, community minded, and even though her character arc doesn’t take center stage, the movie is only strengthened by having such a compelling protagonist (anchored by a strong performance).

Who are the monsters (and why are they scary)?: What I like about this movie is that, even though the villagers are creepy and sometimes murderous, they’re not monsters. We have some creepy ghosts and some black magic, but ultimately the real monster is the curse that catches up with everyone eventually.

This movie will freak you out of you’re creeped out by…: Shadow puppetry, dusty houses, and (I’m sorry, there’s no nice way to say this), a lack of skin. Maybe not a good one to watch if you’re pregnant, or have young children.

Is it a metaphor for something?: Maya’s journey to the village feels like a voyage into a preindustrial past; if I were to research this movie’s themes, I’d definitely start with Indonesia’s relationship to its rural villages. The curse threatens the futurity of the village , and we learn how the most powerful man in the village prioritized his own offspring above all else, at a terrible price, It’s sort of like if The Changeling was told from the point of view of the titular changeling, as Maya learns that she is the beneficiary of violence, though not financially. There’s also some class stuff; in the city, Maya can barely pay rent, but in the village she may be a wealthy woman. The structure of the movie’s curse also emphasizes that all actions have consequences, and, similarly to the most famous J-horror films, that there are not easy solutions to the violence and traumas of the past.

 Is there a twist?: A lot of secret dads in the melodrama backstory, but nothing that fundamentally changes the plot imo.

 What kind of ending is it?: Another things-are-resolved with a stinger (because remember, curses can never just go away).

 The girlfriend’s rating (i.e. how much would this upset my girlfriend?): X for mortal child imperilment. Not suitable for Girlfriend under any circumstances

 But how gay is it?: Dini and Maya are very much not an item, but they do have chemistry, and they do share a bed once they get to Maya’s ancestral home. I’d ship it.

Watch this if you enjoy: Mysteries, curses, magic, folk horror, and creepy old houses

Musical Accompaniment: The musical score, with its creepy vocalizations, gave me big The Shining vibes.

Girlfriend’s Corner: Sara tried to tell me about the plot of this movie and I began to squeal so that I could not hear her describing the plot of his horrible film over my squealing. I hate this. I wish I had never been told about this. Why can’t Sara just watch normal movies like a normal person where infants are not subject to body horror? This is bad. I feel bad.