With new film Ghost In The Cell, director Joko Anwar uses monsters to expose corruption

SINGAPORE –When government officials in Jakarta invited Indonesian film-maker Joko Anwar to screen his horror comedy Ghost In The Cell for them, he was ready for them to take offence.

After all, the grisly deaths in the story stem from abuse of power by the authorities. The film goes further by mocking the way some high-level civil servants flaunt their wealth in public.

“The movie took so many references from people who sit in power now, in the way they speak and the way they dress,” says Joko, 50.

Instead of silence or criticism, the government officials thanked him for his message, as they saw themselves in the characters trying to fight for a more just society.

“There are so many people (in the system) trying to make a change, but they cannot. For them, the movie is inspiring,” says Joko, who spoke to The Straits Times at local cinema GV Suntec on April 23.

He was in town to promote the M18-rated Ghost In The Cell, his 12th feature film as writer-director. It opens in Singapore cinemas on April 30.

In the film, investigative journalist Dimas (Endy Arfian) is imprisoned for the gruesome murder of his boss, a deed which he says is impossible for him to have carried out because of his timid nature and small stature. Larger, tougher inmates target him for shakedowns or worse.

Informal prison leader Anggoro (Abimana Aryasatya) becomes his reluctant protector. Anggoro hates injustice and the prison is rife with it – working-class prisoners are treated brutally, while former officials jailed for corruption are looked after like royalty.

But even the toughest guys in jail are no match for a wrathful entity who turns human bodies into horrific art installations or, as Joko calls them, “macabre art”.

The prison is Indonesia in miniature, he says. In the film, a former civil servant serving a slap-on-wrist sentence for graft is shown at the start of his political career, when he was an idealistic youth organiser, agitating for a cleaner government.

“When they were student activists, they spoke for the people,” Joko says. After riding that populist wave into office, the fiery slogans were forgotten. Making money became his goal, says the film-maker of the character representing political hypocrisy.

In Joko’s previous horror films such as Satan’s Slaves (2017) and Impetigore (2019), he touched on ideas of religion, patriarchy and the grip that rural officials have on villages.

Despite several of his works criticising the current political structures, he has not landed in legal trouble because he knows how to bend the perimeter of allowable political speech.

“You have to bend it without breaking it. If it’s broken, then it’s no use because then you’ll not be able to continue speaking out. That’s a craft in itself,” he says.

Horror the perfect medium to speak on issues

For Joko, horror is the perfect medium for addressing real issues because it gets under the skin like no other genre. The flood of dismal headlines has numbed everyone’s senses, forcing him to go to extreme lengths to shatter viewers’ emotional safeguards, he says.

“Whatever you’re seeing in the news and social media today, all of it is shocking. The events we read about in the news – it’s all very graphic, physically and emotionally. This movie is made to make people face reality and asks that you don’t turn away,” he adds.

And what he is making viewers face is corpses – several of them, arranged in poses that are as aesthetic as they are grisly. Turning actors into meat sculptures required the work of several practical effects specialists. Six illustrators collaborated with Joko to draw bodies.

“The actor to be put in a cast cannot move for three to four hours, to make the silicone mould. We take the silicone body and cut it up. We then add the accessories: the intestines, the blood, the bones and the eyes. And then before shooting, it will be touched up again to make it more real, more wet,” he says.

On Joko’s Instagram page, there is a video of cast members walking into a room and reacting to the macabre art. Their response, naturally enough, was to let loose a string of expletives.

In February, Ghost In The Cell was screened at the Berlin International Film Festival in the Forum section, a showcase for films that push boundaries, often in politics and culture.

Oddly, for a film-maker whose works have been selected for major festivals, including in Berlin, Venice, Tokyo and Busan, he says he scrupulously avoids making festival films.

In fact, he calls such a practice “haram”, which in Indonesia broadly means anything done improperly or dishonestly.

Ghost In The Cell is a movie made for horror fans and, from April 16, was given a wide release in his home country, he says.

“I believe it’s haram to make a festival movie because if you make movies with an intention other than telling a story, then you will not be honest. You try to get into a festival, or if you try to make it artistic, it’s haram.”