Helen's Blog /

Behind The Forbidden Door

Indonesian Cinema was supposed to be dead ! After a flourishing of interesting films in the sixties in that country, little has been known about the sector, but the presence of several New Wave filmakers in their 30s at Udine FarEast Festival with their latest features, sparks new interest by their unexpected avant garde styles.

One of these is the quirky thriller The Forbidden Door by Joko Anwar.

After some colourful pinkish and funky sixties credits, we are taken to glossy capital city, Jakarta where a modern young sculptor (Fachry Albar), displays his statues of pregnant women at a cocktail reception.

Flanked by a beautiful and elegant wife , played by Marsha Timothy, Gambir is admired by all his guests and clients. Everyone seems happy except him. In fact, he hides a terrible secret involving the snatching of a foetus during a family abortion that he hid in one of his works, making him a prey for blackmail by his agent.

Pressure has led to impotency, triggered on by his domineering wife Talyda, and mother, badgering ring him to have a child.

Then strange messages for help start surfacing, and he discovers a locked door in his house that his wife pleas with him not to open.

Plotting his way into a strange building in the city, he discovers a secret society of pervert viewers and is particularly struck by one show depicting some terrifying child abuse.

Despite all his efforts, Gambir can not find and save the young boy, he has never come to terms nor faced his own abuse as a child.

The final knife wielding bloody Christmas dinner scene allows him to avenge all his demons when he massacres his family, associates and so/called friends.

Joko Anwar has obviously inspired himself from works by Stanley Kubrick, David Lynch and more. Although well-made, the story line gets broken somewhere along the way, before the ending, and you find yourself losing the thread with the leading characters. While Gambir declares he is freeing himself by eliminating all his surroundings in a bloody way, his profile is not developed enough to know - was he abused as a child by his parents? Does his wife sleeping with his friend only to get pregnant, justify, killing them both?

Sufficient lack of character development is perhaps, due to the fact, as director Anwar admits, the film was shot rapidly in only 34 days !

The pace is too shaky to allow for any decent following up to the extreme action committed by Gambir at the Christmas dinner..

"The Forbidden Door" also to Westerners could seem far too polished in its depiction of Jakarta, which has got to be in one of the world's poorest countries. As such, the viewer finds himself in a sort of Xanadu-limbo of utter cleanliness and high society.

With his mixture of genres though, Joko Anwar manages to conclude a fascinating look at the new type of cream of modern Indonesian artistic creativity.

Raging between horror, thriller and slightly gore, at best it could be labeled "Extreme" and will most likely entertain audiences world wide who will not be bored by this promising new Indonesian filmakers.