In the Flesh: Impetigore

The opening of Impetigore, Joko Anwar’s riveting 2019 folk horror flick, establishes the relationship between twentysomething tollbooth workers Maya (Tara Basro) and Dini (Marissa Anita) with such breathless confidence that when the movie stops cutting back and forth between them at lightning speed as they chatter even faster over speakerphone, it feels like slamming into a brick wall. In part it’s that kind of masterful pacing — with only a few minor wobbles related to exposition — that makes Anwar’s movie so easy to become immersed in. The lush overgrowth of the Indonesian jungle, the distinct and unwelcoming faces of the villagers in remote Harjosari, the loving detail clearly poured into every set and composition — Impetigore is so solidly crafted that even a momentary effects failure and some over-involved exposition can’t derail its momentum.

The movie’s beating heart, though, is Christine Hakim as village shaman and former house servant Misni. Her big, gnarled body racked with arthritis, her voice tired and hoarse as though from breathing smoke, she exerts such an effortless, white-hot sense of power that when you see her for what she is it feels less like a surprise than the unveiling of a fearsome idol. Her complex tangle of self-loathing, misdirected class resentment, and incestuous desire is the wound around which the entire film revolves, informing every aspect of its twist-filled ghost story and the ongoing generational trauma of the curse under which the people of Harjosari live. Her perfunctory slitting of a throat at the end of the film’s first act is a jaw-dropping moment, an act of casual domestic brutality as clearly inspired by The Texas Chainsaw Massacre as the film’s homage ending.

Impetigore is a feast on every level, from its luridly beautiful sequence in which a wayang puppet master silhouetted against his own screen butchers his musicians and attendants to the spare slaughterhouse aesthetic and eerie inverted sequences in its decaying temple. Its dissection of of class tensions between servants and masters is marvelously deft, delving not just into the right and wrong of it but deeper, to where psychic damage festers across generations and the cost in blood of individual lives can be tallied up neatly in a ledger. This is a film unconcerned with illusions of justice, with sentimental victories of love and restitution over the harm perpetuated by broken people and the people who broke them. Its grisly final moments put the lie to the idea that some magical solution to such problems exist, that anything but shredded flesh and bloody swaddling clothes wait at the end of Maya’s accidental quest to lay her parents’ sins to rest.