The 25th anniversary New York Asian Film Festival took place from July 10th to July 26th. For details on what you missed, click here.
For all my love of NYAFF, there is one genre, a highly represented one, that you wil find I do precious little coverage of, and that is horror.
It is… problematic to paint an entire genre, or, indeed, an entire region, woth the same brush but by and large, the horror movies that have been programmed for the festival aren’t the kind that capture my interest. Which, for the record, is fine! We need to get a lot more comfortable as a culture with the concept of things not being for me, and having an audience all their own that deserves to be served. When you get right down to it, all I’m actually doing with this wind-up is setting up the part wherein I talk about how Sleep No More rules and is exactly the kind of horror movie I wish there were more of in general.
Our story takes place at a large, not-exactly-pristine campus called Evergreen Industries. Evergreen is a wig-making institution with decades of history, owned and managed by the eccentric but marterteral Maryati (Didik Nini Thowok). It seems the equivalent of a factory town, where the employers provide not only work and pay but room, board, and financial services. The employees seem almost unnervingly devoted to their work, but the true measure of the place is established early on when Maryati, all smiles and sunshine over the PA, announces that employees will now be allowed to take a 15-minute break during work… and that those breaks wil consist of mandatory group exercise.
That no one seems particularly put off by this is suspicious. But the sense of potential discontent finds other ways to express itself; namely, an exhausted looking longtime employee doing a fatal header into a cauldron of boiling chemicals.
The death of this employee triggers the appearance of cynical young Putri (Rachel Amanda), who despite Maryati’s insistence that the death was an accident, suspects that her mother committed suicide. But far from being inclined to investigate that mystery, Putri instead seems to be focused on money; like most of the people in this film, Putri is drowning in debt. Her hopes of some kind of insurance payout are squashed by the revelation that her mother was in debt to the company… which, as the eldest of the family, she is expected to take on herself.
Taking up with the company, Putri is weirded out both by the workers’ almost cultlike devotion to Evergreen, and the casualness with which they seem to accept the exorbitant series of maimings and deaths in Evergreen’s history as perfectly natural. But she keeps her head down. Instead, it’s her younger sister Ida (Lutesha) who has questions she wants answered… as she suspects their mothers’ death was neither accident nor suicide but some third, haunted thing.
She’s right, of course.
If Sleep No More was merely a story about a regular old haunting at a regular old factory, I very much doubt it would have captured my interest enough to chance a viewing. But a wig factory made for an intriguing backdrop, and the monster itself– which, spoiler alert, happens to be a giant, sentient mass of hair– proved too delightfully odd to resist. And I’m glad I didn’t, seing as how this film does pretty much everything I ask a horror movie to do these days: mainly, show me something new. And, as monsters go, ‘hair monster that crawls into your ear and takes possession of your body when you get too tired from overwork’ does indeed feel pretty new.
But it’s not just the setting and the monster that intrigue; it’s the world and the tone in general. There’s a casual acceptance of the supernatural that feels unique. While ever dyspeptic Putri is either in denial or disinterested in the possibility that their mothers’ death had supernatural causes, no one else at Evergreen is so dubious. They easily and openly accept the posibility that the factory is haunted… but either write it off as harmless or, when confronted with the very real possibility that it isn’t harmless, tell themselves that they’re unlikely to succumb to its dangerous antics. After all, that would get in the way of work.
In fact– and not to get too trite here– but maybe the real horror is that these people are so obsesed with work and being good and worthy employees that they’re willing to time and a half their way into oblivion.
And all of this is to say nothing of Iqaal Ramadhan’s Bona, a simple minded “brother” to Putri and Ida who has an inexplicable ability to (painfully) regrow severed limbs. Who or what Bona is never gets fully explained to the audience, and the part he ultimately plays in the narrative is… something else entirely, in the best way possible.
Director Edwin, who co-wrote the screenplay with Eka Kurniawan and Dalshi Matsunaga, has created what could have been a pretty standard ghost story and added enough interesting wrinkles and ideas to make it feel like its own thing, existing in its own peculiar orbit. I can’t say whether or not this will get me to flip on my NYAFF horror aversion, but its certainly a very good start.
