INDONESIAN kidnap thriller Monster tells the story, with no dialogue, I might add, of two young siblings that are abducted and taken to a house in the woods.
Directed by Rako Prijanto, the film opens in a dingy side street where 13-year-old Alana (Anantya Kirana) and her young brother Rabin (Sultan Hamonangan) are fooling around in a video arcade after school. Things quickly take a more sinister turn when the pair are grabbed and locked in the trunk of a car.
Looking to films like A Quiet Place and The Black Phone for influence, Monster is a reimagining of the 2020 American horror movie The Boy Behind the Door. Set in a low lit and grubby murder house, what unfolds is like something out of The Silence of the Lambs, only with far less drama or tension.
After giving her abductor Jack (Alex Abbad) the slip, Alana uncovers the full extent of her abductor’s heinous crimes as she attempts to save her brother from the monster that has him in its clutches.
In one room she discovers a camera on a tripod set up next to a bed, indicating child pornography amongst her kidnapper’s many crimes. While in another scene a child’s body is cut up and placed in a cooler box before a courier comes to collect the gruesome package.
The lack of dialogue does add a certain tautness to proceedings, and the film’s fast-pace and lean 86-minute running-time makes it a more entertaining watch than the original film.
As Alana creeps around a desolate rural dwelling, uncovering horrendous evil lurking behind every door, a game of cat and mouse is played out as she tries to evade capture and save her sibling from harm.
Now showing on Netflix, the focus throughout the film is Alanna’s game of hide and seek with this psychotic killer but little is done to rack up any real sense of unease, mainly due to an almost skittish movement of cameras from captor to prisoner.
Overall, Prijanto’s film is predictable and follows the same well mapped territory of many other abduction horror films.
(3/5)
