While Indonesian horror filmmaker Joko Anwar has been steadily working since the late 2000s, his international breakout came with the release of 2017’s Satan’s Slaves (Pengabdi Setan), a remake of Sisworo Gautama Putra’s 1980 movie of the same name. Wonderfully blending the best of Western haunted house filmmaking with a gruesome Indonesian edge, Satan’s Slaves was a remarkable success, one that cemented Anwar as one of this generation’s genre heavyweights. His latest, the Netflix release Grave Torture, retains Anwar’s signature style—this is a big, colorful, visceral piece of filmmaking—though those intrinsic trademarks are muddled by an incompatible scale and pace. It’ll bludgeon your head with a mace, so to speak, but it will take a moment to get there.
Sita (Faradina Mufti, Widuri Puteri young) and Adil (Reza Rahadian, Muzakki Ramdhan young) live with their parents in a Mother Goose-esque bakery (seriously, there is so much bread made in the opening five minutes, it’s astounding). Their family beats are pat yet endearing. An American chain threatens business, though Sanjaya (Fachri Albar), their father, regularly reminds them that family, not money, matters most in the world.
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It’s a cruel rug pull when, moments later, both parents are killed in a suicide bombing. The assailant was driven to martyrdom on account of the titular grave torture, terrifying posthumous suffering for sinners and the damned. It is, quite literally, an enduring torture in the grave. Sita and Adil are thrust into boarding school before Grave Torture cuts forward to its principal adult timeline. There, Sita and Adil remain close, yet Sita—now working in a nursing home—remains committed to finding the most sinful person alive to definitively prove grave torture is nothing more than a myth.
Joko Anwar’s Satan’s Slaves 2 was a successful exercise in scale, widening the world of the first film with a conspicuously larger budget. Yet, its central horrors remained tethered to the residential apartment bloc at its core. With Grave Torture, Anwar flexes his style (and budget), though the repeated temporal jumps and plentiful locales lack grounding. All of it looks remarkable, and Director of Photography Ical Tanjung manages some impressive graveside detours. But Sita’s internal drive is irregularly grounded, with dozens of disparate threads introduced, compounding what should otherwise be a linear path from one point to another.
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The core of Grave Torture is Sita’s rejection of religion, namely the broader structure mandating we atone not just to those around us, but to God Himself. Unlike this year’s The First Omen, Anwar doesn’t subvert religious horror tropes but rather revels in them. There’s a sickly satisfying sense of carnage, especially in the third act, though all the agnostic posturing is merely window dressing. For a horror movie predicated on Sita’s quest for the truth, there’s rarely any doubt as to what that truth will ultimately be.
Anwar, who also wrote the script, at least has a lot of fun getting there. Less propulsive than his previous work, the most impactful scares don’t arrive until late in the nearly two-hour runtime. When they do, Anwar’s classic, 1980s sensibilities take over. Flesh is maimed, scalps are ripped, and snakes slither down the throats of the damned. Grave Torture is a hellscape of sensational visual flourishes, matched with oppressive sound design from Aghi Narottama. You’ll feel every drop of blood spilled.
With bits of Insidious, his own Satan’s Slaves, and even a dash of Jacob’s Ladder, Grave Torture is admirable in its ambition. That ambition, however, is also its greatest constraint. No different than Sita crawling (quite literally) into the graves of the deceased to capture unqualified proof of the dead’s suffering, Grave Torture is commendable in its biggest swings. An overstuffed plot, lack of focus, and unconventionally safe depiction of religious uncertainty render it one of Anwar’s weaker offerings in recent years. Those final five minutes, at least, are a sight to behold. If there was any doubt before, that finale alone proves Anwar hasn’t lost his touch yet.
Grave Torture is now streaming on Netflix.
Summary
Grave Torture isn’t a grave misfire, but for all its gruesome thrills, an overstuffed plot threatens to bury Anwar’s latest.
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