Fantastic Fest Review: The Draft!
Indonesian metahorror takes a loving stab at tropes
By Richard Whittaker, 1:30PM, Fri. Sep. 20, 2024
Ever get the feeling you’ve seen this story before? If you’ve ever seen an Indonesian horror movie – not the ones generally lined up for international distribution, but the straight-to-video schlock – then The Draft may seem very familiar. But that’s the trick.
If anything, it all seems so familiar, like the conventions of the Western slasher just translated. Director Yusron Fuadi sets up the simple convention of a bunch of twentysomethings driving to a remote, semi-abandoned villa. There’s alpha male (Ibrahim Alhami), the feminine Ani (Anggi Waluyo), tomboy Wati (Anastasia Herzigova), and outdoorsy Iwan (Adhin Abdul Hakim) – or, as wannabe filmmaker and self-described nerd boy Amir (Winner Wijaya) describes him, the dumb character that can't keep his mouth shut.
It’s all so perfectly predictable, especially when Ani starts seeing ghosts, and that’s all before they find the creepy Dutch graveyard, the creepy abandoned well, and the extra-creepy Uncle Dadang (Ernanta Kusuma in his final role) who guards the house and keeps politely telling them to not go into the creepy locked room. Of course, at some point someone has to work out that none of this can be what it seems, and that’s when The Draft! pulls the rug from under the audience in a suitably ridiculous fashion.
No genre is quite so dedicated to self-awareness and self-lampooning as horror, but it’s not always easy to pull off: case in point, how sure-footed Japanese metacomedy One Cut of the Dead was in comparison to its ham-fisted French remake, Final Cut. Suitably, both films have played at Fantastic Fest, where The Draft! received its international premiere, and luckily it’s much closer in smarts and humor to the Japanese original. The eagle-eyed, and experts in Indonesian horror, will realize that Fuadi is doing more than simply emulating or mocking the tropes of his home nation’s movies, even though he clearly grasps them extraordinarily well. Instead, he innovates them, predicated on the gang not just understanding the rules enough to survive them but to use them to their advantage. It’s up to the audience to pay attention – to stereotypes, music choices, why the title card for The Draft! reads as Saten Alas! (literally, Damn Devil), even seeming continuity errors – to work out exactly what Fuadi is up to.
The payoff is all part of the fun, as Fuadi and his cast push Indonesian horror into a new direction. Yet because it clearly comes from a place of love and appreciation, it’s no more damaging to the industry than Scream was to the American studio horrors. Indeed, filmmakers in those trenches might feel a twinge of recognition. They even have a champion in Amir, who cheerleads for indie filmmaking as much as he lambasts conventions that horror audiences around the world probably just take for granted. Metatext floats around like the scent of chainsaw fumes, and just remember: If the stabbings and hauntings and hangings and spooks and disinterments get too much for you, it’s definitely only a movie.
The Draft!
Indonesia, 2024, 84 min.
International Premiere
Wednesday 25, 8:25pm
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Fantastic Fest, Fantastic Fest 2024, The Draft!
