Impetigore
AKA Perempuan tanah jahanam
(2019) 106 min
Rated: NR (gore, nudity, sex)
Country: Indonesia
Director: Joko Anwar
Starring: Tara Basro, Ario Bayu, Marissa Anita, Christine Hakim
Links: IMDB | Wikipedia
Rating: ★★★★☆
A girl and her best friend realize that she might have inherited a huge house in a remote village in Indonesia and the two decide to visit the village to reclaim it.
Synopsis:
Maya (Basro) and Dini (Anita) are best friends who talk through their phones as they work as tollbooth collectors in Jakarta, Indonesia.
On a night shift while alone in her booth, Maya is attacked by a man wielding a golok. He says he is from a village called Harjosari and calls Maya “Rahayu”. Maya narrowly avoids being killed before the attacker is shot dead by police.
Maya tells Dini that her late aunt who raised her left her a photo that might have been her parents and used to call her Rahayu before suddenly calling her Maya. Her deceased parents are Donowongso and Shinta and stand in front of a large house. Maya decides to see if she can use the large house for money for a future clothing business.
A wound on her leg she got during the attack contains a tiny scroll of paper. She takes a photo of the paper.
Maya and Dini travel by bus to the village where Maya was born. While Dini is the bathroom Maya shows a man on the bus who loves languages if he can read the scroll in the photo. He tells her it is written in ancient Javanese and is a spell to keep away bad spirits. He says this spell was written by an evil person and asks where she found it. Maya lies that she found the image on the internet.
Once the bus stops Maya and Dini ask for a ride to the village, no one seems to help except for a man with a horse drawn cart who takes them to the remote village and tells them he also brought the village elder, Ki Saptadi (Bayu), back there once. The girls decide to post as university students to ask questions in the village about wayang (Indonesian shadow puppetry). Maya decides to stay in the old house in the photo that she believes belongs to her parents. It sat abandoned for twenty years.
Maya and Dini see a funeral and decide to visit the nearby cemetery. Maya finds the graves of her parents and says a quick prayer. As they leave they notice many small graves for newborns and that the cemetery itself used to be say “Courtesy of Donowongso” but was covered up.
During the night Maya hears noises. Meanwhile, in a nearby shack a woman gives birth to a baby and a man takes it away and puts it in water to drown. The next day another funeral procession passes by the house that Dini and Maya are in. They decide to follow the funeral. The village elder approaches them telling them he knows they’re there to ask questions about puppetry. The girls apologize for interrupting and leave.
Dini decides to take a bath at the house while Maya goes to get food in the village. In the village she asks a woman at a food kiosk about the large house. The woman, named Ratih, says her grandmother told her devils used to live there and left a horrible disease.
Two men talk to Dini at the house and tell her they can’t stay there since the house doesn’t belong to them. They say the village elder, Ki Saptadi, has all the documents concerning the one heir of the house. Dini tells them she is Rahayu, heir to the home. The two men tell her that they will take her to Ki Saptadi so that she can get the documents now before he takes a trip out of the village. Dini agrees to follow the men.
Dini follows the men into a thick forest and starts to become suspicious. She tries to run away but trips over a fallen branch and breaks her ankle. The men smash her head with a rock. Later Dini awakens to find herself tied and hanging upside down with a bucket beneath her. Ki Saptadi appears and Dini begs for him to help her. He ignores her. His mother, Nyi Misni, appears and slices Dini’s throat telling the men that other women in the village are going into labor.
Later we see the mother putting Dini’s removed skin on a laundry line to dry and then scraping the skin to prepare much like leather.
Meanwhile Maya is searching the village looking for Dini and even comes to Ki Saptadi asking him for help. Later Maya tries to seek his help again, but he is busy performing shadow puppetry for the village.
Later a woman in the village goes into labor. The baby birthed is covered in blood and skinless. Ki Saptadi takes the baby and drowns it in a bucket. Maya who followed a girl who told her a baby was being born, finds the house and sees Ki Saptadi drowning the baby.
A villager named Ratih, who Maya saw at the kiosk earlier, helps hide Maya and takes her to her home. She tells Maya that the village is cursed and hasn’t had children in 20 years. The family that lived in the large house used to be rich and the village leaders. They had many servants, one of which was Nyi Misni, Ki Saptadi’s mother. The village elder had one son named Ki Donowongso. Once the father died, Ki Donowongso inherited all the wealth and was a brilliant puppeteer, skilled at making the puppets as well as performing. He married the most beautiful woman in the village, Nyai Shinta. They could not have a child after 3 years of marriage. Finally after five years of trying, they were able to have a baby, but it was born without skin.
Soon three girls went missing in the village. After a time finally the daughter of Ki Donowongso was seen. A rumor started spreading that Ki Donowongso had something to do with the missing girls. Ki Saptadi said that Ki Donowongso made a pact with the devil to protect his daughter. Ki Donowongso went mad. A loyal servant took the daughter away from the village. Ki Saptadi says that if the daughter is returned to the village and her skin turned into leather for puppets the curse will be lifted from the village. Maya asks Ratih why the villagers trust Ki Saptadi’s words and she tells Maya that they have no one else to look up to.
Nyi Misni tells Ki Saptadi and the other villagers that they got the wrong girl. The villagers decide to hunt down Maya.
Meanwhile, Ratih tells Maya that she is pregnant and her husband went into the city three months ago to find a cure. Maya recognizes his portrait as the man who attacked her in the toll booth. Ratih tells Maya that her grandmother is a great shaman and knows that killing Rahayu will not lift the curse.
Two men from the village search Ratih’s house but she hides Maya. One of the men threatens to rape Ratih, but she tells them she will kill herself and haunt him forever. The two men leave, but not before telling Ratih that the other city girl was killed and her skin turned into leather puppets.
As Ratih and Maya hide in the forest, Maya tells Ratih that she met her husband but he tried to kill her and he was killed by police. Ratih is in shock and Maya runs off.
As Maya runs through the dark forest, three ghost girls appear and one shows her in a series of scenes what actually took place. Nyai Shinta and Ki Saptadi had an affair. Nyi Misni took hair from both of them secretly and cast a spell causing Ki Saptadi to forget and the unborn child to perish. The baby was born without skin. Ki Donowongso killed the three village girls and made puppets out of their skin. He also sewed the spell into Maya’s leg. Ki Saptadi killed Ki Donowongso and his wife in revenge for the three girls getting killed.
A ghost girl tells Maya she has to bury the three puppets with their bones for the curse to be lifted. Ratih finds Maya and they run away from the villagers. They retrieve the puppets from Ki Saptadi’s house and dig up the bones in the basement of Maya’s house and rebury them with the puppets.
Nyi Misni enters the house and tells the women that Donowongso’s father had an affair with her and Saptadi is his illegitimate son. Maya tells Ratih to check on a mother going into labor. The villagers surround Maya and knock her out.
She awakes to find herself tied upside-down. As Ki Saptadi is about to kill her, Maya tells him that she buried the skin of the three girls with their bones and that she is actually his daughter but her grandmother put a spell on him to forget. Ki Saptadi asks his mother and she puts a knife to her own throat telling him it’s Maya or her life.
Ratih arrives with a newborn baby that is healthy. The curse has been lifted.
Ki Saptadi uses his mother’s arm while she is holding the knife to slice his own neck. In anguish, Nyi Misni slices her own throat with the same knife and mother and son are dead. Ratih cuts down Maya and tells her to leave.
Maya runs through the jungle screaming and finally flags down a truck and rides it to freedom.
One year later a woman in the village suffers a very bloody miscarriage and in a mirror Nyi Misni can be seen eating the fetus.
Review:
This film is very engaging and the characters are interesting. The story suffers a bit from being a bit convoluted. Perhaps if it were edited down in story to the bare essentials it would be perfect. As it is, it is quite shocking and fairly dramatic for a horror film.
The film was good at showcasing shadow puppetry as a large part of the plot. I think it represents a good bit of rural Indonesian culture that isn’t seen so often in film.
I found the theme of cursed women to be interesting too. It had both a strong villainess and heroine who were pitted against each other. It’s worth a watch for anyone who likes interesting settings in their horror films with a paranormal cursed village theme.