By Seth Lukas Hynes
Monster
Starring Anantya Kirana, Sultan Hamonangan and Alex Abbad
Rated MA15+
4.5/5
An Indonesian remake of the American film The Boy Behind The Door, Monster is a harrowing horror film with a mostly-successful wordless gimmick.
The film follows Alana (Anantya Kirana) and Rabin (Sultan Hamonangan), two schoolkids who are abducted by a serial killer. After escaping from the killer’s clutches, Alana resolves to stay and rescue Rabin.
Kirana delivers a phenomenal performance of terror, courage and cunning as Alana, and the film has no dialogue whatsoever, with the characters’ names being the only spoken words in the whole film.
Director Rako Prijanto uses an extraordinary command of time, geography and perspective to craft excruciatingly tense cat-and-mouse sequences.
Every inch of the killer Jack’s (Alex Abbad) gloomy house is well-defined, with clear planting of crucial items, making every step of Alana’s ordeal easy to follow (but no less nerve-shreddingly suspenseful).
As a claustrophobic horror film about a resourceful child abducted by a serial killer, Monster is reminiscent of The Black Phone (and has a couple of scenes that pay tribute a little too closely to The Shining and Misery), but also reminds me of the 2014 Ukrainian drama The Tribe.
Set in a school for the deaf, The Tribe is told entirely through Ukrainian sign language with no subtitles; through context, gesture and expression, you still know what everyone is talking about. Even with no dialogue, the emotions of every character in Monster and the puzzle-solving gears in Alana’s head are unmistakeable; there are just a handful of scenes in which the lack of dialogue feels slightly forced.
Not to be confused with the 2003 Patty Jenkins serial killer thriller Monster or the 2023 Japanese drama Monster, Rako Prijanto’s Monster is a chilling, tightly-controlled horror film available to stream on Netflix.
