★★★★☆
Joko Anwar throws a spectre, a dance number and a pointed corruption satire into the same packed cell. Glorious!
Get ready for the wildest, queerest, goriest, funniest prison horror you didn’t know you needed. The master of Indonesian genre cinema, Joko Anwar, is back.
Ghost In The Cell is a dark comedy about Indonesia’s endemic corruption, set in a two-tiered prison that gifts oligarchs a luxury wing while shoving the riff-raft masses (a grab bag of gangsters, subversives and wannabe do-gooders) into the grotty cells of the main block. Into this microcosm comes the titular ghost – a judgemental spectre who brutally murders whoever is displaying the worst attitude at any given moment. This mysterious phantasm turns its victims inside and poses them as gory modern art installations, before repeating the cycle again. Better stay happy, felons!
Anwar delivers a loopy story loaded with gags, satire, gore and violence, in which whistleblower journalist and supposed murderer Anggoro (Abimana Aryasatya) is just trying to find his way through the mayhem. The dialogue zings along, with the quip “This is Indonesia, not Norway” recurring whenever anyone dares ask for things to be even slightly less oppressive. “There’s no point having a plan in this messed-up country,” sighs another character: but a plan is exactly what they’ll need to trap the killer spirit that’s picking them off one by one.
The wildly pin-balling tone takes in action, comedy, drama, and – yes – a big queer dance number, before slamming into a sweet cover of Patience and Prudence’s Tonight You Belong To Me (the creepily childlike ditty many will recognise from Season 1 of American Horror Story).
Ghost In The Cell is as good as anything Joko Anwar has ever made – this is essential viewing for anyone with a taste for Asian horror at its most playful.
Ghost in the Cell played at Tubi FrightFest in London.