‘Joko Anwar's Nightmares and Daydreams’ REVIEW: It’s Joko Anwar’s World, We’re Just Livin-
‘Joko Anwar's Nightmares and Daydreams’ REVIEW: It’s Joko Anwar’s World, We’re Just Livin-
A hand rises from the rubble || Still from Joko Anwar’s Nightmares and Daydreams on Netflix
Minor spoilers ahead for Joko Anwar’s ‘Nightmares and Daydreams.’
From Joko Anwar, the mastermind who turned Indonesian horror cinema on its head with hits such as The Forbidden Door, Impetigore, and Satan’s Slaves, comes a welcome surprise: a new sci-fi series that will delight diehard followers and introduce new audiences to the mind of one of today's most intriguing Southeast Asian filmmakers.
It has only been two months since his latest film, Grave Torture, came out in Indonesia, and here he is again with an ambitious seven-part Netflix series that tells an immense story spanning 40 years of Indonesian history, featuring some of country’s biggest stars, such as Fachri Albar, Ario Bayu, Marissa Anita, Asmara Abigail, and Lukman Sardi, to name a few.
Anwar is not always in the director's chair for Nightmares and Daydreams, as he gives other Indonesian filmmakers their time in the spotlight, but the personal touch that made his previous films distinct while still retaining their mainstream appeal echoes throughout the series.
Not to mention, the way the series explores superstitions and Indonesia's turbulent political history through the motivations of the characters, and the narrative is very reminiscent of the thematic essence in Anwar's previous artistic endeavors. These themes have lingered in my mind since experiencing them, inspiring me to delve deeper into the cultural and historical context beneath the sights and sounds.
In this series, the threads that bind each episode might seem disconnected, akin to segments from anthologies like Guillermo Del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities or Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone. However, you'll soon discover that not everything is as it seems, and the end result might stun you, as it did me.
But my journey into Joko Anwar’s world of nightmares and daydreams started at its weakest point with the underwhelming first episode titled Old House, directed by Anwar himself.
Old House follows a taxi driver named Panji (Ario Bayu) as he struggles to provide for his family and care for his aging mother. After an incident with his mother that almost took the life of his only son, he is forced to put her in a nursing home harboring a dark secret.
Aside from showcasing Anwar as a master in staging pulse-pounding sequences and fabricating terror through a couple of tangled-up monstrosities that make my skin crawl, there’s not much else to praise that comes to mind. Though not short on intrigue, the laughably outdated CGI in the episode’s grand reveal undercuts the scares and the emotional brunt of the moral epiphany it tries to convey in its final moments.
A mysterious gathering in the forest || Still from Joko Anwar’s Nightmares and Daydreams on Netflix
The next part titled The Orphan, tells a moralistic tale centered around a grieving and impoverished couple, Ipah (Ario Bayu) and Iyos (Ario Bayu), who in their desperation to lift themselves out of poverty and despite warnings of a curse that will befall them, adopts a supernatural child with a strange ability to bring wealth and every material desire to those who step up as his parents within six days. And the catch for the rewards of adopting him? They will die on the seventh day.
In terms of quality, The Orphan is a huge step up from the first chapter as it does not overshoot beyond its means, telling a simple and well-acted story of human greed evocative of a Wansapanataym segment but with a bit more darkness to it and a demon child thrown into the mix.
Tales about greed and its consequences are nothing new, but the foresight of its ramifications and the subsequent attempt to prevent it makes for some engrossing entertainment. My only frustration with this episode is that it ends abruptly just as it was reaching its peak, which I would soon find out would happen more often than not in the other chapters.
The third installment, Poems and Pains, also ends on such a note. It tells the story of a frustrated author named Rania (Marissa Anita) who starts experiencing the same pain as the character she’s writing about, leading her to uncover a long-buried secret in her past.
As for this episode, there is no shortage of thrills with its twists and turns as we discover, along with Rania, the origins of the strange phenomena she’s experiencing. But just as the plot starts to thicken by showing us signs that the parts of this “anthology” show might not be as standalone from each other as we thought, it ends abruptly in the same way The Orphan ended.
An “angel” is caught on camera || Still from Joko Anwar’s Nightmares and Daydreams on Netflix
Bringing us into the best chapter: Encounter. The stage is set in an impoverished seaside village with its inhabitants living under the threat of violent demolition and displacement. Here, a lonely and withdrawn man named Wahyu (Lukman Sardi) is thrust into the reluctant position of being a Messiah after he encounters an “angel,” which he manages to take a photo of, causing the villagers to believe that he’s the one to save them from their hardships.
Surprisingly controlled in showing rather than telling, it leaves you guessing whether this “angel” is real or just a trick of the light and whether Wahyu really is the Messiah or not. The episode also reduces the fiery inferno to a slow burn, immersing us in the lives of the people in this godforsaken village beset by in-fighting among its inhabitants and other outside parties threatening to take everything away from them.
The slower pace is a welcome breather, giving you the space to absorb the ideas that connect these seemingly separate stories. One way or another, most of the characters in the series are bound by a desperation to escape the economic austerity trapping them in poverty or the ghosts of the past tied to Indonesia’s tumultuous political history, which has caused nothing but suffering to the characters over the four decades that the series covers.
In a manner similar to the Satan’s Slaves duology, Anwar portrays the architects of this suffering in Nightmares and Daydreams as something evil and inhuman. They masquerade as high-ranking military men or corrupt government officials who know nothing but exploit the suffering of the people to satiate their gluttonous desires (just like in real life).
In the The Shining-esque fifth episode, The Other Side, we see how much more is taken through the story of Bandi (Kiki Narendra), a father who, as you might have guessed, is toiling away to provide for his wife Dewi (Lukman Sardi) and his only son Marhan (Sultan Hamonangan Pane, Muzakki Ramdhan) during a recession.
While on an errand, he stumbles upon an abandoned movie theater where he once worked and, wanting to relive happier times, enters it. Little did he know that this act would literally trap him in his own nostalgia, leaving an irreversible impact on his life.
Out of all the segments, this one is the most tragic. It lets you look into the life of this small but sweet family, who stick by each other’s side no matter how difficult the situation gets. By forcefully plucking the caring father out of it, engineered by wicked architects behind the scenes, we witness how this safe space tragically erodes through the emotionally-charged performances of Narendra and Nursanti.
A man enters a cinema || Still from Joko Anwar’s Nightmares and Daydreams on Netflix
If the blink-and-you-miss-it moments aren’t enough to make the connections between the entries obvious, the penultimate episode, Hypnotized, makes it overtly clear. Anwar’s longtime collaborator, Fachri Albar, leads this entry about another patriarch doing his best to make ends meet for his family. Out of desperation, he uses his gift of hypnotizing people to scam others for money, leading to dire consequences.
Aside from the Twilight Zone goodness and Albar’s manic performance, this simple moralistic tale offers very little. In a vacuum, the episode serves only as a bridge to the finale and an introduction to the larger narrative that the separate stories are slowly building toward.
Leading us into the finale, P.O Box, which follows a sharp-eyed diamond appraiser named Valdya (Asmara Abigail) in search of her missing sister. Her investigation leads her into the heart of darkness of the Nightmares and Daydreams, ambitiously bringing everything together in an explosive and wild climax.
If the sudden cut-off to the end credits of the previous episodes didn’t make much sense back then, they would now. But true to Joko Anwar's spirit of blue-balling an audience, something he’s been doing since Satan’s Slaves, the show dumps way too much information on the audience in the final stretch in an attempt to explain itself. This leaves gaping narrative holes to be filled in succeeding seasons, which might understandably frustrate some of the uninitiated.
Although the chapter in Nightmares and Daydreams leave much to be desired when seen as standalones, together they paint a picture of Joko Anwar’s grandiose vision for the series, even if it’s still incomplete.
‘Joko Anwar's Nightmares and Daydreams’ is streaming on Netflix.
