Movie Review: Impetigore (2019)

*Spoilers ahead for Impetigore (2019)

This movie is also called Perempuan Tanah Jahanam in Indonesian, which translates to ‘Woman of the Damned Land’ or ‘Woman of the Land of Hell’. Either way, it paints a pretty clear picture of the story, once you have some idea of what’s going on. This movie is in Indonesian and I watched it with English subtitles. It won six awards at Festival Film Indonesia and was nominated fifteen other times, most recently for Best International Feature Film at the Strasbourg European Fantastic Film Festival and Best Foreign Film at the Fangoria Chainsaw Awards.

Cast & Crew

Director: Joko Anwar

Writer: Joko Anwar

Producers: Shanty Harmayn, Tia Hasibuan, Aoura Lovenson Chandra, Ben Soebiakto

Cast: Tara Basro (Maya), Marissa Anita (Dini), Christine Hakim (Nyi Misni), Asmara Abigail (Ratih), Ario Bayu (Ki Saptadi)

Music: Bembi Gusti, Tony Merle, Aghi Narottama, Mian Tiara

What’s the Spoiler-Free run-down?

The synopsis does a great job with this one, even with seeming to give too much away.

Maya with her best friend, Dini, tries to survive in a city without a family. She realized that she might inherit a property from her rich family. Maya returns to the village with Dini and unaware of the danger was waiting for her.

Maya lives in the city, first working at a highway toll and then running a small clothing kiosk with Dini. After being attacked at her highway booth by a man who claims her name is Rahayu, she does some digging into her past and finds out that she is from a remote village called Harjosari and that her family may have owned a large property there. Thinking the house is valuable, she and Dini hope to sell it to improve their lives in the city — the two friends brave the potential danger and travel to the village to verify that it is her family home.

I want to jump right in with my opinions this time, as I feel I can sometimes get bogged down by the minutia of the plot and forget that the reason I started writing these reviews was to share my own thoughts. I loved this movie. I thought the story moved along at a great pace, I thought they kept the tension high, I loved the set they built and the village they filmed in, and I thought the two main leads (Maya and Dini) had a fantastic rapport. It’s so rare that you see satisfying friendly banter in a movie and the way these two actresses pulled it off was impressive — you really felt that they were close friends who had known each other for years and were trying to make better lives for themselves.

I was also impressed with how little I felt the need to yell at the screen in frustration — sometimes characters in horror movies are just plain stupid. I was annoyed with two decisions that were made relatively early on, but we’ll get to that. For the most part, though, the characters made realistic choices that weren’t obviously death flags right from the get-go.

I gave this movie a straight 10/10, between the technical quality and the general feel of the movie, so I highly recommend watching before you read on!

So… what happened?

We start in a highway toll booth in Jakarta with Maya counting money and chatting on the phone with her friend Dini, who also works in the toll booth. They are passing time and talking about starting a clothing store together to get out of the dull job they both hate, and Maya tells Dini about this strange man who has been going through her toll and staring at her. She is alone tonight, as the man who usually works in the office nearby went home for the night, so she’s nervous that he’ll drive by again.

As if on cue, Maya spots the car heading toward her booth and alerts Dini. She doesn’t hang up, luckily, and the man slowly comes through. He asks if her name is Rahayu, and she says no. Then she asks if she is from a small village called Harjosari and she again says no. Instead of leaving, however, the man drives through the toll and parks, walking back to her on foot. She closes the door as Dini calls their supervisors for help and again tells the man she is not who he says she is. Again he returns to his car but when she looks back he is coming for her with a knife.

Now, at this point I would be booking it. I don’t care which direction I go in, I’m not staying there like a sitting duck while some strange man comes to kill me. It takes her longer than it should have but Maya does run — because she hesitated, he catches up to her and stabs her in the leg, nearly killing her before being shot by police as they arrive on the scene.

Some time after the attack, long enough for Maya’s wounds to somewhat heal, she and Dini have opened a small clothing store. It isn’t what they’d dreamed of, though, and they commiserate over the high rent and how no one is buying the low quality clothing they have in stock. Maya tells Dini that after the attack she looked through her late aunt’s things, looking for clues about her past. She doesn’t remember her parents, nor where she grew up, having moved at the age of five to the city. She shows Dini a photograph she found of who she assumes to be her parents, with her standing in front of them. Behind the three is a large house, and Maya believes her parents may have in fact been wealthy. She theorizes that if the house is still there, and she can claim it, they could sell it to fund a better life for the two of them. Maya also discovers that her wound from the attack hasn’t fully closed up and, inside her leg, she finds a small piece of paper with writing on it that she cannot read. She takes a picture and accidentally loses the paper, and she and Dini decide to go to this village to find out more about her past.

This is the first major choice in the movie that I, as the viewer, disagree with. Why would you willingly go to a village where the residents might want you dead? They know he came from the village, and before he died he said that her death would save the village from a curse. It would be a logical leap in logic to say that more than just that one man wants her dead. Still, she and Dini take a bus and head to the remote village. On the bus Maya meets an older man who she asks to translate the message her found inside her leg, and he tells her that it protects the wearer from spirits, but also that it was written by someone with evil intentions. She begins to see the spirits of young girls, always together, who always watch her as she passes.

Arriving in the village, Maya and Dini stay the night in the abandoned house that was in Maya’s photograph. It is enormous, clearly the home of a wealthy family, and they have to break a padlock to get inside. Maya hears something moving in the house in the night, but other than that it is relatively peaceful. In the short time they have been in the village they have already witnesses two funeral processions, so they are definitely feeling uneasy.

The viewer, meanwhile, sees why these funerals are taking place. A woman is giving birth and the baby has something terribly wrong with it. It cries, seemingly healthy when not seen on screen, but the village chief, Saptadi, drowns the baby almost immediately upon entering this world. Maya and Dini walk through the cemetery, finding her parents’ graves, and also noting that most of the graves seem to belong to newborns.

The next morning, Maya and Dini meet the village chief and plan to speak to him later about the massive mansion, pretending to be university students researching wayang kulit, a traditional form of shadow puppetry that Saptadi is well known for. While Maya goes to find the two lunch, Dini stays in the house. Two villagers come up, telling her that the house is not safe and that they are waiting for the heir to come and claim it. Dini, sensing that she might be able to make some money (I assume — honestly her actions here make no sense to me) claims to be Rahayu, the heir to the house. The villagers say they will bring her to Saptadi, who they claim is leaving town, so that they can claim her inheritance.

Now… this was a stupid choice for Dini to make. They are literally attempting to kill Rahayu — you know this! Why on earth would you claim to be her? You are actively pretending to be college students for a reason!

Anyway, she goes with them. Like an idiot. She is deep in the forest, with no cell signal, when she finally realizes that something might be wrong. She tries to escape but they knock her out, and when she wakes up she is hanging by her feet in a ruined stone building. They have a table of knives and a bucket beneath her head, and things aren’t looking good. Saptadi appears, and so does his mother Misni, who we briefly met the day before when they arrived in the village. As Dini is begging for her life, Misni cuts her throat without warning. Thankfully she is already dead for the rest of what they do — she is flayed, and her skin turned into paper puppets for Saptadi’s evening show.

Maya spends the day looking for Dini, to no avail. That evening she watches the puppet show but leaves, still distraught over her missing friend. She walks through the village and hears some commotion inside one of the homes — a woman is giving birth. She hides outside, peering through a hole in the wall to watch. The baby is born, crying, and she and the villagers are horrified to see that the baby has been born without skin. Saptadi kills the baby, as he did the others, and Maya is almost discovered when she makes a noise but another villager, a woman named Ratih, covers for her and brings her to her home.

Here we get the explanation we’ve been looking for — why the villagers want Maya, Rahayu, dead. Ratih explains that the village has not had a healthy child born for twenty years, all have been without skin, ever since the deaths of Donowongso and Shinta, Rahayu’s parents. They lived in the massive house and Donowongso was a rich dalang, or shadow puppeteer, whose family had lived there for some time. He married Shinta, a beautiful young woman, and the two lived happily. Unfortunately they struggled to have children and a few years passed before they were able to successfully conceive. When Shinta finally gave birth to a baby girl, though, they were horrified to find that the child was born without skin. They hid away in the house and the villagers did not see them for five years. After five years three five year old girls disappears and the villagers were certain that Donowongso was responsible. It was rumored that Donowongso had made a deal with the devil and killed the girls, taking their skins so that his daughter might survive.

Ratih knows that Maya is Rahayu but does not want to turn her into the villagers, as she believes that you cannot truly end a curse — it merely transforms into something else. The rest of the village, though, are now searching the area for Maya. Misni has realized that they killed the wrong woman, and believes that if they kill Rahayu and turn her skin into the paper shadow puppets that the curse on the village will be lifted. Ratih helps Maya call for help, and tells Maya that her husband is off in the city looking for a cure, as she is pregnant and doesn’t want her child to suffer the same fate as the others. Maya realizes that Ratih’s husband was the man who tried to kill her at the tollbooth, and tells Ratih that he is not coming home. Ratih grieves and Maya runs from her, and the villagers, as the police officer she called for help is murdered.

Maya runs through the forest but falls, injured, and the three ghostly girls she saw before come to her and give her visions of the past. Most of what Ratih told her, and what the villagers believe, is true. Donowongso did marry Shinta and they did have Rahayu, who was born without skin, and he did murder the three girls to allow the devil to heal Rahayu. However Rayahu is not Donowongso’s daughter. Shinta did not love him, and in fact loved Saptadi, the current village chief. The two had an affair and conceived Rahayu — Misni, Saptadi’s mother, found out about their indiscretion and erased her son’s memories of the event and cursed their unborn child in an attempt to erase it’s existance. Rayahu was born skinless because of this, and the curse upon the village is actually Misni’s doing. I imagine she left that part out when she was telling the villagers about how to break the curse. The three ghosts tell Maya that in order to break the curse their skin must be reunited with their bodies, and show her where both are held.

Ratih finds Maya and instead of turning her in, which I totally expected her to do, helps her to find the girls’ bones and take back their skins. They bury them all together and Maya watches the girls’ spirits vanish, and the two know the curse to be broken. They are found, however, by the villagers.

Maya is strung up, just as Dini was, and begs Saptadi for her life. She tells him that he is her father, and about everything that Misni did, and that the village never needed her to die to break the curse. Misni reveals that Saptadi is Donowongso’s half-brother, as his father had assaulted her resulting in a child she never revealed to him. Misni is about to kill Maya when Saptadi, distraught and likely realizing that years of preventable deaths have happened because of his own mother, grabs her hand and uses it to cut his own throat. She in turn is horrified and kills herself, falling on top of her son’s body.

Ratih runs in holding a healthy newborn and showing everyone that the curse was truly lifted, and as they celebrate Maya runs from the village and escapes.

In a post credit scene we see that a year has passed, and a woman is happily pregnant. The village seems healthy and alive, nothing like it was when Maya and Dini first arrived. She goes outside and is looking in a mirror when she is attacked — her husband runs out and she is on the ground screaming, and in the mirror we see that Misni’s ghost has ripped out her fetus and devoured it. The curse has transformed, and become something possibly more horrifying.

Fin.

Thoughts?

This movie was fantastic. It was creepy, the characters behaved like actual people, and the final reveal was satisfying. The overall story was poignant and powerful, with deep themes of shame and bitterness running through it that motivated Misni and Saptadi, whether he knew it or not.

I thought it also had a lot to say about children atoning for the sins of their parents — Maya had not done anything to deserve the hate she received, both from Misni before her birth and from the villagers after what her father had done to save her life. Family curses, and children being held responsible for what their parents had done during their lifetimes, are common themes in horror movies but especially in foreign horror movies. The idea that you cannot break a curse, only change it, is also unique to non-Western horror movies. It brings to mind movies like The Grudge, where no matter what you do you can’t stop the curse from running its course. Misni transforming at the end was both powerful story-wise and a little cheap — it makes sense that a death like hers, filled with pain and guilt, would have led to another curse being formed but it also easily set the director up for a sequel, which I’m sure some viewers would have an issue with. Sequel-bate is a real thing and can be exhausting, as it seems every movie made nowadays is just hoping to be turned into a new franchise.

Only two aspects of the movie frustrated me. First and foremost — how did Ratih’s husband know how to find Maya? She’s going by a different name, all of her family members are dead, and there is really nothing to tie her back to the village other than a photograph he knew nothing about. Second, I’m still frustrated that Dini pretended to be Rahayu. She knew that people were trying to kill her, knew it was a bad idea, but she did it anyway. They were there looking to get rich, I suppose, so I can’t fault her for it too much. It was just so stupid and not something I would do in that situation. To be honest, I would never have gone to the village at all.

Technical Quality: 5/5

All the practical effects were great, the filming was well done, and the set was fantastic. They used an actual rural village, and actually built the massive home for the movie, so it was all authentic. The crew also turned it into a library when they left, and they all donated books and things for the village, so it’s a great story all-around.

Just the Vibes: 5/5

This movie was really, really great. Not exactly a slow burn, because of the attack right at the beginning, but it took its time to explain the history behind Rahayu’s connection to the village and I appreciated it. The flashback sequence was a little jarring, as it took you out of the tension of the rest of the scene, but it was done so well that I didn’t mind.

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Things I enjoyed this week:

One of my coworkers gifted me a lavender syrup that I’ve been putting in my blueberry-flavored coffee — it’s not for everyone, but I’m enjoying my fruity lattes. I also started listening to the audiobook for A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas — I’ve already read the book, but I never got past the first one so I’m seeing if it’s really worth the hype this time around. It was so good I binged it and finished it in about five days — for a 16 hour audiobook, I’d say that’s pretty good. The next one has 16 people on the waitlist ahead of me, so something tells me I’m going to be making a run to the library sometime soon. I also watched Prey, the new Predator movie, and loved it! It won’t be making an appearance in the newsletter because it’s a well-known movie, but I recommend it all the same.

Ciao ✌️

Lauren