★★★★☆
Joko Anwar locks a killer spirit, a song-and-dance routine and a savage swipe at corruption inside one overcrowded cell, then throws away the key.
Lock up your n’er-do-wells and put on your dancing shoes. Indonesia’s king of genre is back, and he’s brought the wildest, campest, bloodiest, funniest prison horror of the year with him.
Anwar’s twelfth feature, which premiered at the Berlinale, is a pitch-black comedy about the corruption baked into Indonesian life. Its jail runs on two tiers: a plush wing for the oligarchs, and a grimy main block crammed with gangsters, dissidents and hapless do-gooders. Then the ghost moves in. This spirit has standards. Whoever has the worst attitude at any given moment gets turned inside out and arranged into a gory art installation, and then it moves on to the next victim. Keep smiling, convicts!
Caught in the middle is Anggoro (Abimana Aryasatya), a whistleblowing journalist doing time for murder, who just wants to get through the carnage in one piece. The dialogue crackles. “This is Indonesia, not Norway” becomes a running punchline whenever anyone asks for slightly less misery, and another inmate sighs that planning is pointless in a country this broken. Bad news, then, because a plan is the only way they’ll trap a ghost that’s picking them off one at a time. Bront Palarae has a ball as a sadistic guard, and the practical gore effects are something to behold. Under all the splatter beats a surprisingly big heart, as a gang of rival inmates learns to have each other’s backs.
The tone ricochets from action to slapstick to drama to a full-blown queer dance number. Then it crash-lands on a sweet cover of Patience and Prudence’s Tonight You Belong to Me, the eerie sing-song ditty that American Horror Story fans will remember from season one. Not every gag lands, but the hit rate is ridiculously high.
Ghost in the Cell stands with the best of Anwar’s work, and it’s a must for anyone who likes their Asian horror at its most mischievous.
Ghost in the Cell played at Imagine Film Festival in Amsterdam.