Impetigore (2019)

Episode 491, 2 Guys and a Chainsaw Horror Movie Review Podcast

Todd: Hello and welcome to another episode of Two Guys and a Chainsaw I’m Todd.

Craig: And I’m Craig.

Todd: Well, uh, we go from a request to an international horror film. I don’t think we do enough of these, honestly. There’s a lot of good horror happening outside of the US and, uh, the UK and stuff, and, uh, we tend to focus a little bit on the Western side.

And there are countries out there such as Thailand, Indonesia, Cambodia, that are well known for being longtime rabid fans of horror movies and have long histories of doing horror movies back to, like, the ’60s and ’70s. I think the last Indonesian horror movie we did, which was also our first Indonesian horror movie we did, was Satan’s Slaves back in 2023 By Joko Anwar, who is one of these directors who snuck into a cinema when he was really, really young, saw a horror movie, was really, really scared by it, and inspired for the rest of his life, wanted to be a director, and specifically wanted to approach cinema from the language of horror.

He was just… And he’s been very successful since then. Satan’s Slaves was a pet project of his. Gosh, I think when we did that, I was actually reporting from Jakarta w- with my, uh, then Indonesian girlfriend, now recently ex-girlfriend. Here we are revisiting this. It, it’s kind of a shame really that Liz is not here to give her perspective on this because, uh, this, this one that we’re doing now, Impetigore, which came two films later for Joko Anwar, is very, very steeped in Indonesian culture.

Satan’s Slaves was a movie that… It was a remake actually of a movie from the ’70s, I believe, or ’80s, that he saw that he really, really loved and, and it was like a pet project for him to finally get that remade. After he had a few successful films under his belt, he was able to do that. This one is a complete original written and directed by him, and it was released in 2020.

Sundance, got very, very good reviews. It was actually a contender. It was Indonesia’s official submission for the Oscars for the international category, and it’s not often a horror movie gets, gets submitted for that. 

Craig: Right. 

Todd: Uh, it didn’t win, but it got lots of acclaim at other film festivals. It has like a 92% rating at Rotten Tomatoes.

It seems like this movie obviously was a big hit in its home country, and wh- where it premiered in the US and Canada, the UK I think, was on Shudder. Following the success of Satan’s Slaves, which was one of their biggest hits, they decided to collaborate with Anwar a bit more and, uh, so Impetigore was released there.

And so I think that’s where most people are gonna be able to see it now. Uh, I’ve got a short list of Joko Anwar movies I want us to do, and so I’m glad we could finally come to this one. I hadn’t seen it before. How about you, Craig? 

Craig: No. I’m sure I had… Y- you know, ’cause I, I pay for Shudder, and I scroll through it periodically, and I’m sure that I saw it there.

As you know, these days I’m not particularly drawn to foreign language films unless there’s a dub, and there’s not for this, I don’t, I don’t think. 

Todd: You had to read. Sorry, the English teacher had to read. 

Craig: Well, to be honest with you, this one, especially in the first half of the movie, less so in the second half, but in the first half of the movie, there’s quite a bit of talking, and it goes by very quickly.

Todd: Yeah. 

Craig: So you really have… You really do have to keep your eyes on the subtitles- More than I typically would like. True. But whatever. I mean, I, I still knew what was going on, a- as much as I was meant to, I think. I also think there may have been a couple wonky translation things. Minor, minor things. But no, I hadn’t watched it before, and, and I’m glad.

You know, this, the podcast gives me motivation to see these movies that I probably wouldn’t just watch on my own. Alan’s certainly not gonna watch- … a subtitled movie abso- with me. Absolutely not. Not a horror movie, anyway. So I’m, I’m glad to have had the opportunity to watch it, and I think it’s, it’s worth watching.

One of the things that I like about these foreign films is I, I think that yes, they’re often steeped in a culture that I’m not particularly familiar with. So I don’t know what is real and what’s entirely fiction, but it is nice to kind of see different parts of the world and, and these stories, at least the foreign films that we’ve done, typically have original plot lines and interesting things going on that you haven’t seen a bazillion times over.

I mean, this movie shares similarities to some things like Wicker Man. I, I felt like it was l- like, it like those folk horror movies. Absolutely. And it may strictly be because it’s foreign, but also there’s focus on the gore. The plot lines are not at all similar, but it also reminded me, ugh, it’s escaped me.

What’s that controversial movie that they skin a girl at the end so that she can have, like, a transcendental experience? 

Todd: Oh, uh, Martyrs. Martyrs. 

Craig: Martyrs, yeah. Shades of that. Shades of lots of things. Yeah. I mean, shades of Hostel 2, if you wanna get right down to it. True. But still, still an original story that I was invested in, and I liked the way that, uh, I liked the pacing of it and the way that it played out.

I, I, I was entertained. 

Todd: Well, you know, I was reading some interviews with some of the, with the director, and one of the things that surprised him was how well it was received internationally because he said, “You know, I, I didn’t shoot this for an international audience. I shot it for an Indonesian audience, and there’s a lot of Indonesian culture in here.”

And so he kinda wondered how that would translate and come across. And sort of like you said, there’s just a lot of common themes here. It is at heart, in a way A typical ghost story in that there’s a ghost, th- they have something that needs to be done in order to banish them or solve the curse or whatever like that, and that, and that kind of happens.

So in that way, it’s very similar. But in other ways, you know, this is very much taking place in Indonesia. You know, the, the two ladies start out this movie in Jakarta as tollbooth operators, and then we end up in a very, very remote village, which is very common. Indonesia, by the way, is a huge country.

It’s made up of tons of islands, and I don’t know if you realize this, many people don’t, it’s the fourth largest country in the world by population. No, I didn’t know that. Yeah. So it’s a, it’s a pretty big country, and it’s got a lot of different languages, a lot of different cultures in it. So it’s a, it’s a really interesting place.

It’s got a very, very rich history and a lot of rich folklore as well, and that’s what he drew from. But also, he’s put in this movie some things that you wouldn’t normally see in Indonesian cinema, like this dialogue at the beginning in the tollbooth between these two ladies. It’s just so casual, really, that, that you wouldn’t normally see that in an Indonesian movie.

And also, there’s a toilet scene later that, where the girls are talking in a toilet and, and all that, and, and again, something that you wouldn’t normally see. And that’s something that the director and the actors talked about, about how… Uh, some of the actors actually said that’s really what compelled them to participate in this movie was they just thought that the script was bold and unique for Indonesia.

But, uh, anyway, yeah, there’s these two girls, uh, who are chatting in a tollbooth. They’re young ladies, they’re in Jakarta, and they’re gossiping back and forth. And I thought this dialogue was very real and very legit. This is just the sort of chatter that anybody would be having late at night with their coworkers.

And I guess they’re talking over their phones because they’re in separate booths. But, uh One of the things they’re talking about, you know, is, “Oh, this creepy guy often visits me in this car,” and this other dude, you know, who drives through with his truck all the time is trying to m- make a pass at me, yada, yada, yada.

Maya and Din. And, uh, Maya ends up saying, “Oh, this creepy car guy’s coming again.” And this guy is creepy. In his car, he pulls up to the toll booth, and he’s just staring at this woman. He gives her his money, and she gives him his ticket or whatever, but then he parks past the booth, gets out of his car, and starts walking to her, which is totally freaking her out.

And I thought this was an interesting scenario. I don’t think I’ve ever seen this kind of scenario in a horror movie because when you think about it, in a toll booth, this is a solitary place, but it’s also kinda busy. 

Craig: Yeah. 

Todd: You know? But it’s busy with people who are busy passing through and in their own cars, and so, uh, what a, what a clever idea to have this creepy guy approaching her in this place where she is vulnerable even though she is sort of surrounded by people, and there will be people coming through.

Craig: Yeah. I mean, it’s late at night, and it seemed like it wasn’t, you know- 

Todd: Super busy … 

Craig: bustling. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, I mean, it is a public space, but, I mean, you also think about it, she’s basically in an eight-by-four-foot box. There’s- Yeah … there’s nowhere really for her to flee to, and she struggles with getting it…

And, and this guy, I don’t remember if he talks to her- 

Todd: He does … 

Craig: or asks her name or something. 

Todd: He asks if she’s from a particular village and asks who her father is, and then when she sort of says, “M- m- mm, no,” and he walks away, but then when he goes back to his car, he pulls a machete out. 

Craig: Right, and he chases her with it and gets her down on the ground, and he says something like, “We just don’t want what your family left behind.

Take it back.” But then the police show up, and they shoot him. And we cut to l- later, where the, the two women, I think, are now selling clothes, like, I don’t know, they’re vendors or something. They want to open their own clothing store, but they don’t have any money, and this is when Maya starts talking about her parents, and you’re gonna have to refresh my memory.

I watched this last night, and I don’t even remember some of the details. 

Todd: Yeah. 

Craig: She doesn’t know her parents? 

Todd: Right. She was raised by her aunt and uncle and then taken to the city. All she knows is she grew up outside of the city, and they took her to the city when she was, like, five years old or something.

Craig: But what makes her think now about it? I guess just because the guy asked about her dad and the village or something? 

Todd: Specifically, he mentioned her dad, Kidono Wango, or something like that. And she didn’t know w- who this guy was or who her dad was, but then she goes back and she ends up looking through some photos, and she finds this one photo of her aunt and uncle with her as a five-year-old standing in front of this big house.

And on the back it has that name, that Ki Donowongo, and the name of the village on it. 

Craig: I see. I see. 

Todd: Yeah, so now she kinda knows for the first time, because l- you know, she later kind of explains that her aunt and uncle didn’t talk about her parents at all, and didn’t really tell her much about her past, and they’re gone.

So she’s thinking, “Oh, there’s this huge house here. This might be my inheritance. Maybe I can go back to this village and claim this, you know, and have some money So that’s her initial motivation. 

Craig: Right. And y- I mean, that’s, uh, kind of presumptuous. Like, like the, the whole, the whole plan is they’re just gonna show up and I guess- Prove

claim this house and then they can sell it and have money to, you know, for their future and their business and, and whatnot. This was the scene that you were talking about. I, I feel like they’re having this conversation about maybe being able to sell the house while Maya is sitting on the toilet. And at one point I think maybe she got a little bit cut or something by the machete.

She wasn’t badly injured, but there’s a little cut on her leg, and I don’t know if it’s from the machete or if it’s from something else, but there’s a little cut, there’s a little cut on her leg and she pulls something out of it which I can only… Like, it’s like a tiny little scroll, but it almo- it looks like a, like a fortune out of a fortune cookie.

Todd: Yeah. 

Craig: But she can’t read it. I guess it’s not her language or whatever. Right. And she doesn’t seem particularly concerned- Concerned … that she pulled that thing out of her leg. 

Todd: Well, I, I think she seems a little disturbed by it, but like what can she do? You, you forgot that when the guy had her down on the ground with the machete he saw the scar on her leg.

She had a scar there before and he dug into it- Oh, okay … with the machete. So she- Oh, okay … she had been cut there, but you know, it had more or less healed and while she was sitting on the toilet suddenly it started dripping again. So there’s some kind of m- maybe sort of supernatural element here because this was obviously sometime later.

You know, they have their kiosk now. But yeah, you’re right. She pulls this scroll out of her leg. What a weird, weird thing. She takes the picture of it and then somehow she ends up dropping it in the toilet, so she loses the scroll, but, uh, she has a picture of it and it’s in Javanese. It’s in a language that she doesn’t, she doesn’t know, so she can’t really translate it.

It’s crazy. 

Craig: Right. She and her friend both get on a bus to go to this village that they’ve never been to. They don’t know anything about it. 

Todd: Oh, by the way, before you talk about that, isn’t it crazy that toilet scene? I mean, I even thought for a Western movie that was pretty… I mean, number one, you don’t normally see people sitting on the toilet in a movie, and when you do- Yeah

the, it’s usually like not very exposed, but this girl is sitting on the toilet. You can almost see everything. I mean, she’s in a little bit of darkness, but she wipes and everything right in front of us. 

Craig: That was a little bit… It was a little bit shocking because I didn’t realize, you know- It’s, I don’t, I don’t think that it’s all that uncommon to see scenes of women or of people in general talking in the bathroom- Yeah

you know, while somebody’s brushing their teeth. And, and so somebody might be sitting on the toilet just because that’s the seat that’s available. 

Todd: Right. 

Craig: I didn’t realize that she was naked from the waist down until she stood up and pulled up her underwear. 

Todd: Yeah. 

Craig: And I don’t know. I mean, it didn’t occur to me that that would be pretty brazen in that part of the world.

It, it just didn’t occur to me. But yeah, I, I did notice. 

Todd: I, I thought it was brazen, period. Like, I don’t think, like, I was just like… Anyway, I’m, you know, you’ve seen it all in horror. Yeah. Why not, why not somebody wiping themselves on a toilet?

Craig: Uh, they ri- okay, so they, they get on a bus and f- she runs into, like Russian literature professor, and he’s like, “Oh, I really like languages.” And she’s like, “Oh, well, can you read this?” And he says, “It’s a spell to ward off spirits- Mm-hmm … but it was made by an evil person.” And that’s kind, and that’s kind of the only thing that he says.

And then she sees three creepy girls on the side of the road, and we have no idea what’s going on with that, but of course we find out later. And when they get to the bus stop, the bus doesn’t drop them at the village. The village is so remote that some of the people in the village that they live in don’t even know where it is.

Todd: Yeah. 

Craig: But they do find a driver who’s willing to take them. He makes them pay him quite a bit of money, but he, he takes them there. 

Todd: Yeah. 

Craig: He tells them that he had recently been here because he, for some reason, he brought the village elder back home from a trip or something, and he tells them that the village elder is, is kind of a famous or at least well-known puppet master.

Todd: Yeah. 

Craig: And bec- because they, you know, they get there, they arrive in this village. It’s a really cool location, and we spend the rest of the movie here. 

Todd: Yeah. Actually, part of the reason why this movie took so long to develop, I think it, it was about 10 years from the time he wrote the script to the time he ended up making the movie, was they spent a lot of time looking for the right locations.

Anwar said they spent, like, three months looking for a village that could resemble the village in the script, and they found someone who was hiking in the forest who said that he stumbled upon this village that was just sort of cut off from the modern world. So this is an actual village formed in 1941, made for workers who worked on the plantation for Dutch colonialists, and they just lived there ever since.

And so, um, they went there. They found that it was perfect, but they had to make facilities in order to shoot there. Like, they had to make a path- Sure … so their cars and equipment could go through. They didn’t even have toilets or bathrooms there, so they actually built proper toilets. And then when they were done shooting, they were used by the locals.

So they actually like improved their infrastructure permanently in this village as part of the shoot. It didn’t even cost them a million bucks. 

Craig: Mm. 

Todd: And the big house that they built for the main set, the, the big house that she lives in, and, uh, they left it when they were done shooting, and they supplied books, and the house became a library for the locals.

Oh, wow. So it’s really kinda neat. 

Craig: That’s cool. It is really neat. I mean, it, it looked very authentic. I assumed, I mean, i- i- if nothing else, I assumed that they had built sets in the jungle because it does, I mean, it seems very remote. They’re surrounded by jungle. On their way to meet this puppet master guy Which I wasn’t even entirely sure what that meant.

I just thought, “Well, I, I guess he’s a puppeteer.” Right. And he kind of is, but that’s another cultural thing that comes in later. Again, I know nothing about Indonesian culture, so I don’t know if this is a real thing. I presume it is. But the puppeteering later is really cool. Yeah. So, so I’m excited to talk about it.

But, but they pass the house and they get to his house, and an older woman answers. She’s very stern-looking, she’s got a limp, and she says, “He’s not home. You’ll have to come back tomorrow morning.” And they’re like, “That’s fine.” Dini, I don’t remember how to… Din, Dini, the friend- 

Todd: Dini, yeah. 

Craig: The subtitles are Din, yeah

the friend says, “Should we call the guy?” ‘Cause they have the, the card. The driver gave him his card. And sometimes their cell phones work there. Not usually, but sometimes. But she’s like, “No, no, it would be stupid to go all the way back and it’s expensive. We’ll just stay here.” So they just make themselves at home in that big house.

Todd: Yeah. 

Craig: Well, I guess they figure- Now, a couple of things. F- first of all, like, you know, like, they don’t seem to have any qualms about just making themselves at home there. 

Todd: Right. 

Craig: Um, they go in and they figure that it’s been… She moved to the city with her aunt when she was five years old, and she’s 25 years now, so the house has been abandoned for 20 years.

I don’t think so. It doesn’t look like it’s been abandoned for 25 years except in the bathroom, the outside is kind of making its way in, and that’s a really cool set piece. There’s, like, roots and stuff coming out of the walls. 

Todd: Uh-huh. 

Craig: But other than that, it’s mostly furnished. It’s dusty and stuff. It does, however, looks mostly undisturbed- Yeah

which is kind of haunting. It begs the question, why? Why is it… It’s, it’s the nicest, the biggest, nicest house in the village, but nobody’s living there. Yeah. So that’s mysterious. The other thing that I thought was just so funny about them making themselves at home is they’re not even sneaky about it. No.

Like, they’re lighting fires and candles. They’ve, you know, they, they’ve got the house lit up like a goddamn Christmas tree. 

Todd: Yeah. 

Craig: And

I guess- But all right, whatever … 

Todd: she figures if anybody comes by and questions them she’ll be like, “Well, it is my house, so, uh…” 

Craig: I guess. But that’s the other thing, too. Like, it never comes up. Like, she’s never… In fact, there’s some mistaken identity that’s key to the plot, but- How… It just seems like such an odd plan to just…

Well, she does say, “Once we establish that it was my parents’, then I’ll come back with a lawyer.” So I guess she does have- 

Todd: Right … 

Craig: a concept of a plan. 

Todd: It’s like a fact-finding mission. What do I need to do to, to claim this house? You know, kind of the beginnings of all this, yeah. 

Craig: Right. 

Todd: I thought that the colors and the cinematography in this movie is just gorgeous.

Craig: Yeah. 

Todd: It, it is very widescreen, and every bit of the frame is just beautiful. I think it’s kind of amazing, actually, how he can shoot in such darkness. There is there’s no day for night in this. It’s night for night, you know? And there’s so much- Yeah … shadow. A lot is lit. Uh-huh. In fact, he mentions, you know, the puppeteer, and we’ll talk about it later, he’s a shadow puppeteer.

The, he- Joko Anwar mentioned that he used that as a kind of a theme for, uh, the cinematography as well. A lot of the lighting in the movie comes from a single source. 

Craig: Yes. 

Todd: And, uh, you know, these candles they’re using or something like that. And so there’s so much shadow and so much darkness, but there’s so much richness of detail in those shadows.

Just the gradation is just beautiful. And it really takes its time. I really like how this movie establishes atmosphere. 

Craig: Mm-hmm. 

Todd: We get a sense of how the village is laid out. We get a sense of how this house is laid out. Like you said, that bathroom is just really pretty creepy. The camera almost walks us through the house with the ladies.

Craig: Yes. 

Todd: And it’s not the first time it’s gonna do this. At times early on in the movie, there was a lot of s- of, of handheld happening, and it wasn’t the distracting kind of handheld that’s just jittery and shaky. It’s just the slightly floaty sort of handheld that, that felt real for the scene, especially on the bus.

You know, there’s just a little bit of bounciness to the camera that, that I noticed. And then when we get into the village and through this house, we’re very steady cam moving through it, and, uh, and it gives it that, that kind of creepy quality. Also just mixed with very, very static shots, uh, uh, in exteriors or very slow dollies in and, and out.

I just thought the cinematography was gorgeous in this movie. 

Craig: It, it did look really good. Yeah. The, like, you, the warm light, you know, everything’s kind of lit by candlelight. And, and, you know, the cinematography looks really good during the day, too. Mm-hmm. It’s, it’s very crisp and clear, and there’s a lot of outdoor stuff going on, and it’s in a r- a, just a beautiful environment to look at a- and an interesting environment to look at.

Yes, I was impressed with it, too. I thought that ultimately it was very well-made. You know, the more I think about it, you said traditional ghost story. It is kind of, but to me it really feels more like folk horror in that this m- this village has a mystery. 

Todd: Right. 

Craig: You know, there’s, there’s, there’s something secret about this mystery, and we are going to learn about it slowly, piecemeal, until at some point they get to a huge exposition dump.

That, 

Todd: that felt 

Craig: a little sloppy. But 

Todd: I was grateful for it. 

Craig: Yeah, because there really is a lot to… There’s a lot of intrigue. There’s a lot going on. There’s a scene in the house that I thought was a little bit cheap, where it, n- the way that it’s shot, you just see a figure in the back moving toward the main character, and it is a very ghostly looking figure.

And I thought, “This isn’t gonna be a ghost. It’s gonna be her friend, and it’s gonna be a jump scare,” and it was. And I thought- 

Todd: Uh-huh … 

Craig: that was lazy. 

Todd: It was, it was kind of a, a cheap way of trying to get something spooky in, you know, in the beginning when we don’t have a lot o- of spooky stuff happening. Once the amulet, you know, is out of her leg, she does start seeing things, right?

Even when she leaves the bathroom, there’s a scene where, you know, everything’s shut down all of a sudden, and she sees these figures, these women who are kind of robed, and there’s singing involved, and there’s just this, like, kind of three figures. And, and then when she’s going by on the bus, she sees these three creepy kids who keep appearing out in the woods as they’re driving by.

It’s, like, the same kids. 

Craig: Yeah. 

Todd: So, you know, there’s some of that happening. So yeah, he’s kind of inserting a little bit of this- In there, but that was, that was a little off from everything else ’cause she never saw it. That was- No … for, that was only for our benefit- 

Craig: Right, 

Todd: right … to try to freak us out. Yeah.

Craig: Yeah. A- a- and then, like I said, they make themselves comfortable in the house, and I don’t, I think she finds more pictures and, and she sees pictures, quite a few pictures of her parents, like, in front of the house and stuff, but she makes note of the fact that she’s only in one of them. The 

Todd: one she has.

Craig: Only in one picture, that she has all of them, and her friend’s like, “Well, maybe you were ugly.” 

Todd: Her friend was fun. I liked her friend in this. 

Craig: She was fun. She, yeah, she was, uh, modern and quippy and, yeah, I, I liked her quite a bit. I was like, “Don’t get too attached to this girl ’cause there’s no way she’s making it through 

Todd: the end of this movie.”

Yeah, she’s… That’s the trope. 

Craig: And you 

Todd: were right. 

Craig: And I was right. But yeah, you know, they do s- they see some strange things. They see, you know, on their first day there, they see a funeral procession, which is interesting and different from funeral processions that I’m accustomed to, traditional stuff. And she visits her parents’ graves, and they, they make note of the fact there are lots of children’s graves in the cemetery, and that they don’t even have names.

None of the kids even have names. And then there’s something weird about the cemetery sign, but I didn’t understand what was going on. 

Todd: Yeah, the cemetery sign- 

Craig: Did you, did you notice? 

Todd: I did, yeah. The original cemetery sign which said, uh, “Courtesy of Donowongso,” which was her father’s name or whatever, the rich guy in town, was covered up, and the, the new sign just says the, the Village Cemetery.

So sh- her friend makes a comment like, “Boy, they must not like your, your family very much.” 

Craig: Right. Right. 

Todd: So there, that’s very interesting. By the way, I loved the humor at the grave when she’s sitting down and they’re praying, and the girl’s, her friend says, “What did you pray for?” And she’s like, “You know, that my, that my parents would find peace.”

And she’s like, “Did, did you pray that you would inherit their fortune?” And she goes, “Uh, yeah, that too.” Yeah, that was funny. But anyway, uh, so it’s nighttime again, and they’re still staying the night because they’re waiting for this, this puppet master to come back. Ki Saptadi is his name. And, you know, she wakes up.

It’s classic, right? She wakes up to noise. And there’s great camera work here. This is all, like, a one-shot steady cam for quite a while. And I love how the fact that it almost feels like we’re in the house with them, looking around with her because, you know, the camera follows her as she kind of wakes up next to her friend, and she tries to wake her friend, but her friend just is like, “I’m just going to sleep.

I didn’t hear anything.” So she gets up and she starts walking around, and she’ll hear a noise, and then the camera will whip around for our benefit to kind of show us down that hallway where the noise came from, you know? It’s like we’re walking along with her. I really like this bit. She’s exploring, trying to figure out the noise and, and eventually she sees a, we see a figure.

It looks like one of those children looking in the window. And, uh, when she goes to the window and opens it, obviously there’s nothing there. But she goes… She sees the gate, and I’m not sure exactly what she saw 

Craig: Maybe a light? I wasn’t sure. She saw something that compelled her to investigate further, and then she comes upon a harrowing scene.

Todd: Yeah. 

Craig: Just, I, I mean, it, it’s, it’s near her house. 

Todd: Now she doesn’t see this, right? We saw, we see this, but she’s not there. 

Craig: She doesn’t? She doesn’t see it? 

Todd: Not at this point. 

Craig: No, maybe 

Todd: you’re right. This is a cutaway. Maybe you’re right. Yeah, this is a cutaway to something for our benefit here. 

Craig: Yeah, you’re right, you’re right.

Be- because there is a woman giving birth, and it seems like there is a, a man there who we hadn’t seen before, and he looked like he was in some sort of vestment or something, so I didn’t know if he was a priest or a holy man or what But when the baby is born, this man immediately takes it and drowns it.

Todd: Yeah. 

Craig: And that was very troubling. I mean, you- th- they really do… I thought that he did a very good job of showing just enough to make it very uncomfortable. It really was the crying followed by the silence that was most unsettling and shocking to me. But this is all happening at night, and again, it’s, like, lit by the fireplace, and so lots of shadow.

The baby isn’t entirely concealed from us, but in this moment, I didn’t see anything about it. Let’s just say I thought it was weird that he was drowning it. Yeah. And I didn’t know what was going on. I didn’t know if it was… Because the parents, it’s not like, it’s not like this is some cult, and this is just what they do, and the parents are cool with it.

Like, the parents are clearly grieving. 

Todd: Yeah. 

Craig: Nobody seems to be celebrating this. There doesn’t really seem to be any ceremony to it. He just takes the baby from them as soon as it’s born, takes it over to a basin, and drowns it. That’s it. 

Todd: Yeah. 

Craig: And then the next day they have another funeral for that baby.

Todd: Yeah, it raises a lot of questions and a lot of intrigue. Uh, uh, I just thought it was very cool. And you’re right, this was shot very well. At one point, we have the baby’s perspective underwater, you know, which, which basically tells you exactly- Yeah … what’s happening and oh, my God. Yeah, uh, so, so they actually walk out to the funeral, and they observe it.

And then when these guys who are at the funeral see them, they walk towards them, and that’s when we realize one of these guys, the guy who drowned the baby, was Ki Saptadi. He’s the elder that, uh, they were looking for. The 

Craig: puppet master. Mm-hmm. Yeah, right. The village elder. Uh-huh. Yep. 

Todd: They don’t know about the baby drowning.

That’s just us, and he, he goes ahead and invites them to his house. So they end up going to the house, and they’re, they have this cute argument outside about Din really wants to go. She’s like, “I just think we should leave all this stuff.” 

Craig: Uh-huh. 

Todd: And, uh, Maya’s like, “Let me just get the information, and, and we’ll go.

Let’s just keep pretending we’re students. Nobody kills students.” 

Craig: Yeah, that was funny. 

Todd: That was hilarious. 

Craig: But they split up. They do. Like, they- Yeah … he inv- he invites them over later, like, “Come over tonight.” And they say they, like you said, the one of them wants to leave, but they decide to stay, but they split up, and the second they split up, I was like, “Dang it.

You dum-dums.” Never, never split up. This is when the bad stuff happens. You are two young women alone in a foreign land with no, you know- God knows if anybody even knows they’re there. Probably not. 

Todd: Right. 

Craig: Ugh, and, and it was bad. The friend just goes back to the house. She wants to get cleaned up. She says she smells like a dead raccoon or something.

And the- Maya goes to get them food, and she goes to a roadside food stand where there is a beautiful young woman who’s selling food. It’s in a tent, and so everything under the, under the tent is in dark shadow. But in the very back of the tent, you see an elderly lady in shadow sitting in the back. And when Maya tells the girl where they’re staying or why they’re there, she, she says something about the house.

The old lady says something about it in that language that Maya doesn’t speak, and she asks the younger woman, “What did she say?” And the younger woman tells her that the old lady said that the house is a house of disease. Devils used to live there, and they left a disease. Of course, I had no idea what she was talking about.

I didn’t know if the devils who used to live there were Maya’s family or somebody else. I didn’t know if disease was a metaphor for something, but it’s very ominous and ultimately very true. But we don’t really know that yet. 

Todd: I mean, at this point you’re just getting a sense that Maya’s family history is very, very troubled, and probably has something to do with what’s going on here.

The village doesn’t like them. You know, the house is overgrown. Nobody’s going in there. And meanwhile, Din is pouring a bath, and I’m thinking, “No, don’t do it. Don’t take that bath,” because earlier in the movie the camera kind of dollied in on the bath in a sinister way. Yeah. That was weird, but maybe it was just a little bit of foreshadowing for the- the- the tension we’re supposed to feel later because as she’s pouring the bath and pull- pulls some water out, uh, there’s a knock on the door, and two men arrive.

And I was like, “Oh, God, this is gonna be so bad for her.” They say, “Hey, you know, we just happened to notice you guys are staying in the house, and you know you’re not allowed to stay here. It’s not safe. You know, it- it’s an old house. The roof might collapse.” 

Craig: Yeah, they say the roof might fall off or whatever, and they’re being a little…

They’re being friendly, but it’s… I was n- very nervous- Yeah … 

Todd: for her. 

Craig: And they say, “You can’t stay here. It isn’t ours. We can’t use it.” So I got the sense that they were speaking for the community, for the town. Yes. And I thought, well, that’s telling, but, you know, obviously the question why, but anyway. Somehow they bring up that the owners of the house had a daughter, and they say in a totally really shady way- 

Todd: Yeah

Craig: that they can’t use it ’cause it’s not theirs. It belongs to somebody else, and they’re just waiting for her to come back and claim it. And then for reasons that I’m not sure I understand, the friend says that she is the daughter. 

Todd: Mm-hmm. 

Craig: And they’re like, “Oh, uh, okay. Um, you should come see, um, our elder, the puppet master.”

And she’s like, “Yeah, we’re supposed to go see him later.” And they’re like, “Um, maybe you should come see him now ’cause, um, yeah, yeah, uh, plans changed and he’s leaving later,” being very shady. 

Todd: I, I did wonder why she didn’t just say, “Yeah, this is my friend and she’s gonna be back soon.” 

Craig: Y- yeah. 

Todd: It’s really stupid to do this by yourself, and for all, of all people, Din, who was the one who was the most freaked out by this village, why did she decide to take it upon herself to try to sort all this out fast?

Craig: I mean, she seems, just her character feels very streetwise and, and I just thought, I feel like this, this girl is too worldly-wise- 

Todd: To do this … 

Craig: to be this stupid. 

Todd: Yeah. 

Craig: But I don’t know. Yeah. I mean- 

Todd: This was a little contrived. I don’t know. I felt- May- … a 

Craig: little contrived … I mean, if, if they wanted to overtake her, they could do it there at the house if they wanted to, I suppose.

But she walks with them into the forest alone. 

Todd: Yeah. 

Craig: Never a good idea. 

Todd: I, I felt like one of our patrons, uh, Caroline, at this point, where I was just like, “Don’t do it, girl. Don’t go with them.” Yeah. Sounded like something she 

Craig: would say. That was good. That was good. Yeah. Um, and, and so eventually, you know, uh, she keeps like, “Are we there yet?

Are we there yet?” And they’re like, “Oh, just a little bit further now.” And eventually she just stops and says, “You know what? I’m gonna go wait for my friend.” And they won’t let her leave. They, they chase her with a knife and she tries to run away But she breaks her ankle. Even before they chase her, it, it was such an upsetting line, but oh, it just made me think of what a nightmare it must be to be a woman sometimes, because she says to them, “You don’t have to rape me.

I’m no virgin. All you have to do is ask.” The, the- Yeah … just the notion that she finds herself in this position and she’s doing everything she can to protect herself from violence, even if that means having- Giving herself to 

Todd: them … to do something terrible. Yeah. 

Craig: Right. 

Todd: That was, that was disturbing. You’re absolutely right.

Craig: Yeah. But it doesn’t matter. They, they chase her with a knife and she breaks her ankle and she tries to fight back and this is, you know, a, a very troubling and upsetting scene, and eventually the camera kind of cuts back so we’re looking at them from a distance, and one of the man, men hits her with a big stick and another one smashes a rock down on her head.

Todd: I thought she was dead. 

Craig: I thought for sure she was dead. She would’ve been better off if she was. 

Todd: Yeah. 

Craig: Because the very next thing that we, she, she wakes up, we wake up with her and she wakes up and she’s hanging upside down from a rope in a structure in the middle of the woods. It looks like it was once a building, but now it’s just four concrete walls and no roof, and she’s hanging there upside down and I knew this was not gonna end well.

Todd: You’re right. It’s, it’s like Hostel 2. It’s 100%, you know? Mm. They place a bucket underneath her. There are these knives all lined, like a multitude of knives lined up on a table. 

Craig: Yeah, like an altar full of knives. Mm-hmm. 

Todd: Yeah. And in comes Ki Saptadi, but now he’s dressed up, and we saw him place like a dagger in his belt, almost like a ceremonial dagger.

Of course, she’s begging for her life and, uh, he stands standing there, and they’re kind of about to do this thing, and suddenly that older woman who we saw before at Ki Saptadi’s house shows up and just says, “What are you doing?” And she runs in and just grabs a knife and slices that girl’s throat right away.

I- that was shocking. 

Craig: Yeah, I thought she was gonna cut her down. 

Todd: Yeah. She says, “Two women are in labor right now. If we hurry, we might be able to save their babies.” Ugh. You know, interesting, again, the cinematography, just amazing. The scene is bookended by two incredible shots. The one is kind of an upside down shot of this girl and her head, and as it pans out, it twists so that, uh, we see that she is in f- in fact hanging upside down and it pans away.

What we get at the end of this is the opposite, where, you know, she’s bleeding out and just choking, and the camera comes in on her head and turns back upside down. And as gruesome as it is, it’s a beautiful picture of her wavy hair- Yeah … coming up and the blood kind of dripping past her. It’s, it’s something else, you know?

Craig: Yeah. 

Todd: I mean, I don’t normally I don’t normally, you know, I think I’ve said this many, many times, I don’t normally like, like the beautification of violence and, but, but the shot was- Sure … was beautiful and much like every other shot in this movie. And one of the things that I, I find disturbing about this movie, like most others of its type, is that this is very real violence.

This isn’t overdone Hollywood violence that we can kinda laugh off and, and whatnot. Everything that happens in this movie to these girls is very real and presented in a very real way. 

Craig: Yes. 

Todd: Thankfully, a lot of it’s off-screen. 

Craig: Yeah. 

Todd: Uh, but still, it’s pretty horrible person-on-person violence that could actually happen in the real world and, uh- 

Craig: Yeah, it, it, it was and another disturbing thing, Maya goes to the priest’s house to look for her friend and the priest pretends like he doesn’t know where she is.

He invites her to stay but she says, “No, I, I need to keep looking for my friend.” And then we see a scene of the older woman. I thought she was hanging her laundry. It felt, it was a very like- 

Todd: Domestic-looking 

Craig: scene. It looked like a, a domestic old world, the older lady hanging up her laundry on the clothes line, but it’s not her laundry, it’s the friend’s hide, skin.

They have skinned her and specifically what the old lady is hanging up in that moment are her breasts. 

Todd: Yeah. 

Craig: It was really, like when she… You know, it just looks like she’s hanging up clothes or whatever. She flops it over the line and these breasts flop down. I was like, “Oh.” 

Todd: And it’s unmistakable. 

Craig: I didn’t know.

Todd: Yeah. Yeah. It’s shocking. 

Craig: And then there’s a nighttime ceremony with a shadow show that we’ll see more of later, but the, the priest does a shadow show. I guess we could talk about it now but- 

Todd: Let’s do it. I’ve got a lot to say about this. 

Craig: Okay. All right, all right. Yeah, so we, we’ve, we’ve been told this guy’s a puppet master.

We now get to see him performing at this ceremony. 

Todd: I have been a fan of shadow puppets since high school. I don’t know where I learned about them but as, you know, I was really involved in theater and at one point I think in the se- I think it was my senior year in my advanced theater class or whatever, we all had to put together one-acts that we would tour around to the local elementary schools on one, on a day or two.

And I was directing one of these one-acts, and I chose to do a shadow puppet show ’cause I’d read about shadow puppets, I thought they were really cool, and so I kinda created this whole thing. And so ever since then, I’ve really been into shadow puppets. And Southeast Asia, Indonesia’s not the only place.

Thailand is most famous for it, but several countries in Southeast Asia are famous for it. They have a long history of shadow puppetry, including China. I mean, it probably all came from China. Most of this stuff did. But, um, I knew exactly what was going on in this moment because I know something about shadow puppets.

These shadow puppets that you see are made from cowhide. 

Craig: I did not know that. 

Todd: Yeah. They, they scrape the skin until it’s really fairly thin, then they dry it out, and then they cut them up, and they paint them, and that’s what’s used. And so the minute this shot comes in where it shows the person setting up and there’s this foreground shot of his assistant dropping down some shadow puppets in a bowl next to him, I said, “Holy shit, these were made from this girl’s skin.”

And I think, yeah, if you were an Indonesian watching this movie, you would know it from that moment. If you’re Craig or somebody else who’s just not familiar with this stuff, it has to be explained to you later. 

Craig: A- a- and it is. The movie takes the time to explain it to you later, but you’re right. I would love, you know, I’m watching this.

You get to see it from both sides. You get to see what the audience is seeing, and you get to see the performer on the other side, and it, it’s just a really cool art, and I would’ve been happy to spend a lot more time there in the movie. It goes by pretty quickly here. I don’t ex- remember exactly how it happens.

A little girl tells Maya that a woman is giving birth, and Maya goes and watches from the window. They’re all excited ’cause they think that the baby is going to be okay, the curse is broken. We don’t know what the curse is, but we know that they believe that it’s broken. But the baby is born, and the priest drowns it again, and they’re like, “It didn’t work.”

And I think the old lady I don’t remember if it’s right now or if it’s later, but she says, “We got the wrong girl.” So we know now Maya’s in trouble. They’re looking for her. A young woman helps her. Was it the young woman from the food stand? Yeah. I couldn’t tell. 

Todd: It was. Same woman. 

Craig: Yeah. The young woman from the fruit- from the food stand helps her and says, “I’m not like them.”

And she says, “It’s not safe for you. You have to hide.” Her name is Ruth. Ruth takes Maya back to her house and drops some exposition. Yeah. She says that the village, the village is cursed. There have been no kids born in 20 years, or no kids that have lived in 20 years. And then I don’t remember, are we told this story at this point?

Does she tell the whole story? At some point, Maya has to flee. She falls unconscious or something, and she has a long flashback. That’s much later. But I think that that’s later. 

Todd: Yeah. Yeah. We’re about an hour into the movie right now, and she’s in her home, and this is when she… Yeah, this is our first big exposition dump.

Basically, there was a very rich man and his family who lived in that thing. That’s was Ki Donowongso. He, he had all the wealth. He was the amazing puppet master. And then his wife, Naya Shinta, was the most beautiful woman in the, in the village. They got married and had a huge wedding, but they tried to have a baby and they couldn’t.

Like, after three years of marriage, she was depressed. She’s ashamed. And finally she got pregnant after five years, and every Saturday night he performed his puppets all night long, and the baby was born, but nobody ever really saw it. And later they learned that it had a special condition, that it was born without skin.

But later, the village saw the, the child after it was, like, five years old or something, and it was seen and it was healthy. But they were suspicious of this and thought that maybe this had something to do with these three missing girls. We don’t know anything about these three missing girls until now.

Craig: Right. 

Todd: But the, the village people get suspicious about this, and there becomes a rumor, and Ki Saptadi Who is the now village elder, uh, but back then obviously he was somehow associated with this house, had said that Donowongos had been practicing black magic. At the end of the day, during one of the shadow puppet shows behind the screen, Donowongos went crazy and he hacked a bunch of people to death behind there before killing himself.

And we see all this in shadow. It’s really cool. 

Craig: Yes. 

Todd: It’s really, really cool. And the w- and he kills himself by drawing a sword across his neck, which is apparently something a lot of people in this movie have the bravery to do. 

Craig: Yeah. 

Todd: And so a loyal servant took the child away to the city, and every child in that village since then has been born without skin.

And if they’re allowed to live, they’d be living in misery. One of them was allowed to live, and that was a mistake. He’s just miserable by himself in the woods. That’s what she tells us. 

Craig: Yeah, and we see him later. I don’t remember if he actually plays any kind of role. I think he’s just meant to be pitiful.

Todd: Yeah. 

Craig: But the only way to break the curse is to skin the daughter- 

Todd: Hmm … 

Craig: and make skin puppets out of her. So that’s not good. 

Todd: No, it’s not good, especially… And when the daughter finds this out, she’s not happy about it. You’re 

Craig: right. 

Todd: She’s a little freaked, but, but Ruth tells her, she’s like, “Don’t worry, I’m not like them.

Yeah, I know who you are, but don’t worry, I’m not like them. I don’t believe in this stuff. My, uh, mother told me that one curse just, you can’t cure a curse.” I don’t remember if she tells her this now or later, but she basically explains that, “My mother or my grandmother told me that, uh, you know, if a curse is lifted, just another curse lands in its place.

It’s… That you can’t reverse this by, you know, doing this kind of thing. In fact, my husband went to the city to try to figure this out, on how, a way to lift the curse.” And she grabs her hand and shows her that she herself is pregnant, so she’s got a lot of motivation to try to get this solved. 

Craig: Yeah. And she’s expecting her husband back, but Maya sees a picture of the husband on the wall, and it’s the guy that attacked her at the toll booth- 

Todd: Yeah

Craig: who now is dead. She doesn’t tell Ruth that right away. There’s a kind of a tense scene where some guys come in looking, but, for Maya but they don’t find her. And so Ruth is trying to get her away, and there’s a cop on a four-wheeler Or was that the, the driver? I, I kind of m- missed that. 

Todd: Um- 

Craig: Like, somebody’s coming, somebody’s coming for her- 

Todd: Yeah

Craig: but there’s also an angry mob looking for her, and the cop and the mob arrive at the same time. 

Todd: Yeah, well, she’s got Nano’s card. Nano was the, the tuk-tuk driver who took them out there. She’s still got his card, right? So she calls him to go get a cop, and so he does. Okay. He goes to get the cop. And so we think that maybe the c- that this guy can save them.

Craig: It turns out he’s in on it, doesn’t it? 

Todd: Yeah. It’s kinda crazy because, um, w- uh, another r- case where I was like, “Don’t do that.” While this girl Ruth is out, you know, trying to take her through the woods to meet up with this cop, she gets the idea to tell her about her husband. She’s just like, “Ugh, I’m sorry, but your husband is dead and he tried to kill me.”

That troubles her, and as she is about to go out and see the cop, yeah, it turns out that the cop was a, a member of the village And so as soon as the cop gets off the tuk-tuk, he’s like, “No, dude. Uh, everything’s fine here.” And Nono’s like, “What the hell are you talking about?” And the cop pulls out a gun and just shoots him in the head.

Craig: Yeah. 

Todd: Ooh, another disturbing scene. 

Craig: Yeah. 

Todd: Oh, God. 

Craig: I know. Then things get kinda wild. I’m not exactly… Somehow Maya flags down a truck. 

Todd: Mm-hmm. 

Craig: I don’t know who the driver of this truck was, but he seems like he’s going to help her. However, a ghost girl appears in the be- or excuse… Maya gets in the bed of the truck.

A ghost girl appears in the cabin with the driver and, like, skins herself in front of him, which distracts him and causes him to crash. 

Todd: Mm-hmm. 

Craig: And Maya gets thrown from the truck and is unconscious, and this is when the ghost girls show her the flashback of what actually happened and why it’s cursed. And basically it just kinda confirms what we’ve already been told.

But this flashback of a- with some additional details and intrigue, this flashback goes on for so long- 

Todd: Yeah … 

Craig: that they keep cutting back to unconscious Maya, just to kind of keep reminding us, oh yeah, she’s still out in the woods and this mob is right there, but we’ll get back to that in a second. 

Todd: Right.

It’s so true. And it’s comp- it’s a little complicated. But essentially her mother had an affair with Ki Saptadi, who was a servant in that house. Ki Saptadi is the guy who’s the n- The Puppet Master … the Puppet Master now. 

Craig: Yes, the elder. 

Todd: And they got caught by Ki Saptadi’s mother. Ki Saptadi’s mother was having an affair with Maya’s father, and so Ki Saptadi is actually Maya’s, like, brother.

Brother or half-brother, I guess you could say. The old lady is upset by this, so she catches them and as Maya’s mother leaves, she grabs a bit of her hair, and then she goes in to her son’s, as he’s sleeping naked on the bed after their tryst, and grabs some of his hair. 

Craig: That was a weird scene. She, like, sits next to him on the bed and, like, caresses his butt.

That was 

Todd: weird. You know what? It turns out, so that actress, that actress who did that, she’s a very famous Indonesian actress. She was, like, 49, I think, when, when she made this movie, and, and she was fasting. This, by the way, was the first horror movie she’d ever done in her career. She was on… It was Ramadan and she was fasting.

Mm. And w- when you’re fasting on Ramadan, you’re not supposed to, like, have bad thoughts. You’re not supposed to, like, do anything, like, bad, really, you know? Mm-hmm. And so the director actually asked her, “Are you okay doing this scene?” She’s like, “Yeah, sure. It’ll be fine.” What she didn’t realize, ’cause they, the whole time they’d rehearsed it he’d been covered up.

What she didn’t realize when they started the scene was he was gonna be naked during this. So she’s like, “I go in and I’m like, ‘Oh, shit.'” Like, “I’m, I’m not supposed to be caressing a naked man.” She’s like, “I’m not supposed to be horny while I’m on Ramadan, but here I am- No, that’s funny … doing this thing.” But she did the scene anyway.

Craig: Huh, that’s funny. 

Todd: And she’s the one who did the whole curse is what it turns out. So she’s responsible for this whole thing. 

Craig: Yes. And I guess she cursed the baby because… I don’t know why. I don’t really get it. But yes, she ultimately is the one who’s responsible for it. So then the baby was born without skin, and that’s when the man who thought he was the baby’s dad but really wasn’t turned to dark magic to…

And, and he did. He killed those girls, those three girls, and buried them in the basement. And, and I guess, I, I, I’m kind of drawing a blank here because I don’t remember exactly what happens. Like, this- 

Todd: Yeah, 

Craig: it’s a little- We’re told all of this- 

Todd: It can be confusing … 

Craig: at great length. Maya wakes up. The ghost girl tells her, “You have to bury our skin with our bones and then the curse will be lifted.”

Todd: Yes. And Ki- Ki- Ki Donowongo or whatever, the, the, the ba- the bad guy who killed those three girls, he didn’t actually kill himself. Kiseptadi ends up killing him because he fi- finds some… I don’t remember why. He, he ends up killing him in this kind of elaborately staged thing. So this, this thing that, this flashback we saw earlier when we thought that Ki Donowongo was murdering everybody and then killing himself, which is what all the village people know as the truth, Kiseptadi actually killed Ki Donowongo- And then he kind of disguised himself as him to do this puppet show, and then behind the scenes of the puppet show, he ends up murdering all those people back there, plus Maya’s mother, and then pretends to kill himself.

Actually, he just takes that body and drops it there. 

Craig: But why did he kill Maya’s mother? Maya’s m- he was having an affair with her, right? Why did he kill her? 

Todd: He forgot, because part of this curse was that he- 

Craig: Oh, that’s right. That’s right, the curse … 

Todd: he forgot that he even had an affair with her, yes. So, so he was kind of made by his mother, in a way, to do all these terrible things.

He thinks he’s helping the village now by doing all the stuff that he does. So, uh, he’s not a bad guy in a way, he’s just kinda manipulated. 

Craig: Yeah. Yeah, the grandma is the bad guy. Th- this was all her all along. Anyway, she wakes up from this long exposition dream, and Maya does, and they knock her out and they hang her upside down, and she begs the priest and she tells him about the girls, and she tells him, “I’m your daughter.

You don’t know it, but I’m your daughter,” and the priest con- and, and kind of tells him the story briefly, and the priest confronts his mom, and the, she, the old lady, threatens to kill herself. 

Todd: Yeah. 

Craig: But meanwhile, just in the background, a new baby is born. I don’t remember. 

Todd: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, you know, th- they knew that…

It’s so convenient in this movie, there’s always a baby being born, you know? 

Craig: Like every day. Yeah. 

Todd: Every day there’s somebody in labor. I mean, for a town where the babies are cursed, you, God, they, they get pregnant a lot. They pull 

Craig: out. 

Todd: You know? 

Craig: Yeah. 

Todd: Well, we kinda knew beforehand that there was a pregnant baby, so you know, it does add some urgency to this scene where we know from our previous scene with her friend, they think they’ve got the right person, they can kill him before the baby’s born, then that will lift the curse and the baby will be born healthy.

Craig: Right, right, right. I 

Todd: mean, it doesn’t really make medical sense because- 

Craig: Oh, 

Todd: right … does the baby suddenly get a bunch of skin? But it’s a curse, you know, whatever. Well, 

Craig: yeah, it’s a curse, right. 

Todd: So- Right … so yeah. So, so the father is begging, “No, you’ve gotta, you’ve gotta kill her now. My, my, my wife’s gonna give birth any second now.”

And luckily, Ruth runs in. The baby’s fine 

Craig: Yeah, because at some point they did bury the girl’s skin with their bones, right? I don’t remember when that happened, but they- Yeah, 

Todd: they did that quite easily. 

Craig: Yeah. 

Todd: Maya and her friend did that. Yeah, just like kind of before this all happened. 

Craig: So the curse is broken, and then again, I’m sure there’s reasons, but I don’t remember why, the priest kills himself.

Todd: Well, he turns on his mother. I, and I get this. At first it seems a little shocking, but when you think about it, this poor guy has been totally manipulated into- 

Craig: Yeah, he’s a pawn. 

Todd: Uh-huh. Yeah, he’s murdered all these people. He’s been trying to help fight this curse, and his mother was responsible for all of it.

So when his mother threatens to kill herself by holding a dagger up to her neck and r- approaches him, he just grabs the dagger from his ha- her hand in a very poetic way, you know, by her hand- 

Craig: Oh, right. Yeah … 

Todd: puts it up to his neck and cuts himself. I mean, the poor guy’s probably not gonna be able to live with himself, so it’s sort of a suicide, again, in a very poetic way.

And then as he falls down, his mother’s filled with grief and she slashes her neck as well, and, uh, and falls over him. So, uh, it has this sort of poetic happy ending where everybody who needs to die for their sins has, has died. 

Craig: Yeah. Um, and then Ruth tells Maya to run, and I guess she does. And like Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, I like, Ode to Joy plays.

Todd: A very twisted version, yeah. 

Craig: Yeah. And she hops a ride in a truck, and then it just cuts to one year later. 

Todd: It’s, that truck was… It was very, uh, Texas Chainsaw Massacre homage, right? Uh, she flags the truck down. 

Craig: That’s one of the few things that I read that that wasn’t, that, that it was intentional. It was an intentional homage to that scene where Sally or whatever her name is at the end i- you know, gets away in the truck but is hysterical.

And yeah, and then it cuts to one year later, and I… It was late. It was right before bedtime. I remember what happened, but I don’t even remember, like- 

Todd: Oh, I thought this was cheap. 

Craig: Yeah. Why’d you 

Todd: have to do this? Yeah. 

Craig: Is this in the village? 

Todd: Yeah, it’s in the village. I felt like this… 

Craig: Was it? 

Todd: Yeah. Well, the village looks a little better now.

It’s like a year later now that the curse is lifted, everything’s like a little bit better cleaned up and the houses are a little more, you know, stable, and everyone’s happy. And yeah, it’s just this couple. He comes in, his wife’s pregnant, they’re excited. He sits down for a smoke- Oh, right … as she goes out to the backyard and gets a little bit of water from the well and goes to a mirror and looks in it and lets her hair down and sees how beautiful she is.

And she is, she’s just glowing. She walks away, and there’s a reflection of the mother, like the mother’s ghost in the mirror, and suddenly there’s a scream, and he comes out. The woman’s on the ground suddenly having a miscarriage, and he’s like, “The baby, the baby. What’s going on with the baby?” And in the mirror, you see the ghost of the mother.

It looks like she’s maybe eating. 

Craig: I think she’s eating it. Yeah, I think she’s like ripped it out of that lady and is eating it now. 

Todd: Mm-hmm. Like, come on. 

Craig: And that’s it. 

Todd: What 

Craig: a- It was fine. I don’t know. It’s okay. I mean… 

Todd: All right. 

Craig: Yeah. Yeah. 

Todd: So now she’s still gonna keep the village cursed, I guess. She’s gonna eat all the babies.

Craig: I guess. Well, that’s what that one lady said, like, you know, one curse replaces another or whatever. 

Todd: True, actually. True. 

Craig: This, uh… I liked this. It was good, and if you haven’t seen it and you don’t mind reading subtitles, I would encourage you to watch it. I think it’s worth it for the puppet stuff alone. 

Todd: Oh, yeah.

Craig: It reminded me a little bit of the animated sequence in Krampus- 

Todd: Oh, yeah … 

Craig: which I also really loved Like I said, I, I would’ve, I, I could’ve watched a half an hour just of that performance ’cause it was just really, really neat and, and shot very beautifully. But overall, you know, I don’t have any… I don’t know much about this movie.

I don’t know, you know, what kind of budget it was shot on or anything, but it looks very good, and it looks like it’s made by people who know what they’re doing. The acting is, is good. It looks good. The storytelling is twisty, maybe a little bit over the top at times, but whatever. I mean, it, it, it’s got a lot of intrigue, and I, I did have a good time with it.

Todd: Yeah, I was wondering about the title. When I was googling the name of the movie, another result came up that was like, oh, interesting. Impetigo is a highly contagious bacterial skin infection. 

Craig: Yeah, I read that too. And then so combine that with gore to highlight the gore of the, of the movie. 

Todd: Yeah. It’s 

Craig: clever.

Todd: It is clever. Uh, the, the director said that when he was really l- young, his brother had told him that the leather used to make shadow puppets was made from human skin, and that’s just like… He said, “I later learned there was no truth to that at all. I couldn’t find any instance where that was actually the case,” but it stuck with him throughout his childhood.

That was part of the inspiration for this movie. Another part of the inspiration was his actual mother. He said, he said his mother at times was very intimidating to him, so that’s where the mother character came in, as well as, like, the social and political issues that were facing Indonesia at the time and honestly kind of still are, you know, specifically just, like, poor leadership.

And also, he said something interesting, which is, which is pretty true He said if you look at all of his films, there is one big recurring theme, and that is the question of why do humans dare to bring children into this world because it’s such an ugh, an ideal place for them to grow. And so he explores that, he said, in, in all of his films, and that’s definitely a very strong theme in this one as well.

But yeah, I, I, I just, I just think the movie’s really well thought out. It’s very heavy with atmosphere. It’s got, like you said, a lot of great cultural stuff in here, especially if you’re unfamiliar with it, that’s just really fun to see with the shadow puppetry and then how that was incorporated into the cinematography.

You know, you don’t even have to consciously know these things to just enjoy the movie. 

Craig: Right. Right. 

Todd: The story was easy to follow, and just like you said, and we kind of came to that conclusion, it was a little clunky how it unfolds. It would be, it would be nice if you didn’t just need a giant exposition dump to learn what was going on.

But, you know, I, I just, I just loved it. I, I was never bored. I was intrigued. I thought it moved at a decent pace. Me 

Craig: too. 

Todd: And, uh, it was beautiful to watch and, and really fun. 

Craig: Yeah. 

Todd: So I highly recommend it. As long as you don’t mind reading subtitles, go ahead and check it out. 

Craig: Yeah. And it is, it’s a little long.

I think it is, is just shy of two hours, I think. 

Todd: Yeah. 

Craig: But it doesn’t feel bloated. It, it feel… In fact, it feels like there was a lot of story to tell, and they had to kind of cram a lot in. 

Todd: Compress it. Ah. 

Craig: Yeah. Mm-hmm. 

Todd: It does take time to make us care about the characters. Yeah. Like, all the characters in here are quite strong.

That’s another thing that, you know, you don’t often find in horror movies, so. 

Craig: Right. 

Todd: Good solid movie. Well, thank you guys so much for listening to this episode. If you enjoyed it, please share it with a friend. You can find us online obviously by googling Two Guys and a Chainsaw Podcast. Find us on our website.

Find our Patreon at patreon.com/chainsawpodcast, and drop us a line there. In fact, for five bucks a month, you can get our unedited phone calls that, that go through to make this episode, as well as lots of other goodies, mini-sodes, and little random thoughts here and there, and a great little book club community that we have going where we’re reading horror books all the time.

So if you enjoy that, patreon.com/chainsawpodcast. Until next time, I’m Todd. 

Craig: And I’m Craig. 

Todd: With Two Guys and a Chainsaw.