★★
Edwin’s first full-tilt horror outing swaps the swagger of Vengeance Is Mine, All Others Pay Cash for a possession tale in a Jakarta wig factory, and despite a starry co-writing team, a legendary lead and a mountain of practical effects, it’s neither camp, funny nor frightening enough to earn its shlock.
Sleep No More is a crushing disappointment after Edwin’s superb Vengeance Is Mine, All Others Pay Cash. Reuniting him with novelist Eka Kurniawan and adding Daishi Matsunaga to the script, it unfolds in the Evergreen wig factory, where workers are kept at their benches by incentive schemes designed to make them forgo food, rest and above all sleep. They are overseen by a grotesque workmistress, Maryati, who casts herself as a kind of mother hen while caring nothing for their wellbeing. When one middle-aged woman throws herself into a vat of molten wax, she is written off as a suicide, but her daughters Putri (Rachel Amanda) and Ida (Lutesha) end up on the factory floor themselves, working off her debts and picking at what really happened. Meanwhile their brother Bona (Iqbaal Ramadhan) is on the prowl: an oddball figure once found in a bin, able to regrow body parts Wolverine-style when they are cut off.
Some of the tension here comes from working out how the two plotlines will intersect, and unfortunately the answer is: not very interestingly. The anti-exploitation politics are pat and obvious, arriving pre-chewed. The boss values quotas (and body parts) over life, the supernatural is waved away as sleep-deprived hallucination although there’s no tension as the audience knows otherwise. Compare Nocebo, which in 2022 had not dissimilar thoughts about sweatshop labour and folk vengeance but had the nerve to implicate the Western consumer directly, making the audience the beneficiary rather than the sympathetic observer. Edwin’s factory is a closed system, and its villain is safely, comfortably foreign to anyone likely to be watching it at a festival.
The waste is compounded by what’s on the table. Maryati is played by Didik Nini Thowok, Indonesia’s most celebrated cross-gender dancer, a performer whose whole art is comic and classical female impersonation, and the film barely knows what to do with that gift beyond letting him loom. Akiko Ashizawa, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s regular cinematographer, pushes hard into disorienting close-up, but the images stay drab. Edwin has talked about drawing on 1980s Suzzanna vehicles and on Carpenter, and around ninety per cent of the horror was achieved in camera, yet almost none of that heritage translates into pleasure. Even at ninety-six minutes it plods, never finding the gears it needs. Some late puppet work, and snazzy comic-book graphics over the end credits, are too little too late in a limp, ugly misfire.
Sleep No More played at Montreal’s Fantasia 2026.