Impetigore
shudderJoko Anwar's Perempuan Tanah Jahanam, aka Impetigore, is a hauntingly engaging and fruitfully frightening feature that will send shivers down the viewer's spine, albeit undone with rushed and overly condescending genre convention.
Anwar's film, without trying not to understate the film itself, is a mixture between Ari Aster's Midsommar and Robin Hardy's The Wicker Man and, much to the delight of horror fans, the feature undoubtedly lives up to the comparisons. Anwar delivers chill after chill with spine chilling iconography and a remote setting akin to something out of Cannibal Holocaust. Granted, while the environment itself worms its way into the brain of the audience with its abrasive landscape and intimate features, it is the often cold but intoxicating mystery the begins to unfold that curates most of the film's scares.
More often than not, Anwar goes for the cheap thrill jump scares but crafts such in a technique of disguised edits. Features that will become repetitive for some, yet engaging for others. However, with the strong pull and central character of Tara Basro's Maya continually falling down this mysterious rabbit hole with frightening consequence, the film suffices in its horror convention. Basro, throughout, puts forward a tremendously strong performance with a wide emotional range for the audience to be immersed.
Yet, even when the narrative does a tremendous job of opening up and swallowing the audience whole with its intriguing mystery, Impetigore succumbs to a final act that spoon feeds the viewer every small and intimate detail. Details that drown out the mystery and engaging atmosphere in a drop of interest. Making the viewer wait throughout the films 106-minute running time in an agonising, but hotly anticipating, fashion only to have the work done for them is convicted in an insufficient degree of patronisation.
