The Draft!
Five students in a car on a bad single track road, none of them wearing seatbelts and not quite sure where they are going, in the mix industrial engineer Wati, nuclear engineer Budi, biologist Iwan, nurse Ani and Amir, a film student documenting everything on his camcorder, on the way to a villa owned by Ani’s family for a break from studies, a good idea not well thought through.
No phone signal, no civilisation nearby other than an old cemetery, and the power out since the generator failed, the villa is “maintained” by Ani’s Uncle Dadang, alone since his cat fell down the derelict well behind the property and died, the lamplit evening is oppressive, tales of kuntilankaks, haunting spirits of Indonesian folklore, and Ani’s dead sister, all the basic elements of a horror movie.
The simple premise and the predictable opening scenes of bickering friends and their jungle journey to an unappealing and overly spooky destination deliberately misleading, The Draft! (titled Setan Alas! in its original form, literally Damn Demon!) is directed by Yusron Fuadi from a script co-written with Anindita Suryarasmi, Richard James Halstead and B W Purba Negara, an increasingly gleeful meta-horror playing games with the characters and viewer.
Running superficially parallel to the idea hidden beneath The Cabin in the Woods, it is media student Amir (Winner Wijaya) who first realises, to the understandable initial incredulity of his friends, that they are badly written characters within a horror film, and not even a good one, the writer giving little backstory or shape to his leads and abandoning ideas to rewrite scenes when he hits a dead end.
Amir’s theory a difficult sell to Wati, Ani, belligerant Iwan and Budi (Anastasia Herzigova, Putri Anggie, Adhin Abdul Hakim and Haydar Salishz, initial “cheap” Budi later reincarnated in the “upmarket” form of Ibrahim Allami), Uncle Dadang (Ernanta Kusuma) comes and goes, the writer unclear whether his death was murder, suicide or a mistake, The Draft! is perceived by those within it as a work in progress, but it also plays as such, improving as it goes along but never quite as sharp as it needs to be.
Five characters in search of an exit as Serling would have it, itself inspired by Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author, that the opening act is basic is part of the game the film plays, each revision a step up even as it creates confusion and never so much fun as when the characters refuse to cooperate, presenting their own ideas, the writer, frustrated with both them and his producer, throwing anything into the mix to try to complete The Draft!
The Draft! is streaming on Shudder now
