Respati (Fantastic Fest 2024)

Respati recently played at Fantastic Fest 2024, Sidharta Tata’s movie is the latest in a growing trend of Indonesian horror and thrillers making it to Western screens large and small. Named after the lead character (Devano Danendra), Tata tells the story of a teenage boy who struggles to sleep with survivor’s guilt after his parents died in a tragic accident. HIs nightmare state we see in some haunting (and bloody) nightmare sequences early on. In his struggle to conquer insomnia, he discovers the ability to enter other people’s dreams. He soon realises that a spate of deaths in the real world is related to what is happening in the dream realm – for there is another presence there beside his, a much more vicious one. In this crisis, he is joined by his best friend, Tirta (Mikha Hernan), and their new mysterious classmate, Wulan (Keisya Levronka).

Tone and Genre in Asian territories are altogether different beasts than in the West as movies can be more fluid there than they are here, even so Respati casts a unique shadow where you could legitimately make a case for this as a comedy horror, a supernatural powers movie, folk horror and an inverse composite of Nightmare on Elm Street, and Mike Flanagan’s Before I Wake. The truth, however, is that it is all of those things and for many that will be too much, for those with notable experience with the many flavours of Asian Horror you will find a fun, inventive horror movie with a sensibility appreciable for the mainstream audience with a unique seasoning lent by the fascinating Indonesian folklore & mysticism grounding things. 

Calling Respati a comedy horror may be a stretch. A movie can be funny without being a comedy, it can have characters who might elicit laughs but the movie doesn’t exist to be either a comedy about horror or a comical horror movie – it can have a few funny scenes dotted throughout. Through its supporting characters Respati garners a few laughs as part of a larger canvas of characterisation. Respati’s interactions with his best friend (who can find anything on the internet), his grandfather (Budi Ros) and his grandfather’s aid (Fajar Nugra) will crack a smile, as will the cheekiness of the unnamed members of their class. Humour is just as legitimate a way to connect with a character as pathos, and this foundation also exists as a point of normality for the dream realms and nightmare witches to sit opposite.  

Discussing Tata’s movie as an inverse of Nightmare on Elm Street and Before I Wake is much easier to parse. Craven’s movie saw a figure with transformative powers stalk the dreams of teenagers in Small-town America, and Flanagan’s movie saw a child’s dreams and nightmares manifest in the real world, add some traditional Indonesian folklore and you have Respati. This isn’t to be dismissive, by any means, if anything these touchpoints effectively communicate the vast imagination that Tata and his fellow script-writers Ragiel JP & Ambaridzki Ramadhantyo are operating with. Besides, dying in a dream is required for the character to escape, which may get a little complex in regards to the end game but it’s far from what others might call a plot hole. Instead of a nightmarish approximation of the Indonesian town like those two american movies, much of the sleeping horror happens in a patch of squalid woodland – heightened through strong colour grading but mostly through the location scout bringing their A-game. Speaking of, the transitions between waking and sleeping relaties alone are consistent high points. Once in this woodland, the visuals are forever inventive with its people buried in tree roots, decapitations aplenty and an amazing sequence where Respati runs through a forest into a massive spike that reminds of Stefan Duscio’s parallel, angular cinematography in Upgrade. 

What separates Respati from all of these Western reference points is that it’s an Indonesian movie, not to state the bleeding obvious, yet underpinning all of this is a story of traditional witchcraft, and an earthy, traditionalist spellcraft. What the players need to do to negotiate the nightmare realm is presented with a staggeringly dense and overwhelming level of information, a style of overload that will be familiar to anyone who has watched a political Shaw brothers martial arts movie, and just like those it’s best to just let it wash over you. It also presents a different interpretation of folk horror’s obsession with the unknown and the land to the Eurocentric ideology that embodies most movies under this umbrella term. In the East, it is common knowledge that the produce of the land has different traits and can achieve an overwhelming array of benefits for those who ingest it. Respati takes those traditions and presents them within a modernist tale of a witch stalking her victims through their dreams.     

The last of those aforementioned genre trappings is the superpower fantasy, which many eyes may accuse of being anime-like, only this style of cultivationary storytelling long predates any visual medium with tales like The Journey to the West dating back as far as the 16th century. That is looking at the likes of floating characters, demons, possessions and life beyond in the big picture. Here we have acting you might get in a movie engaging in psychic powers, common in battle anime adaptations and superhero movies albeit on a much smaller scale, permeated by an uneasy atmosphere and a inescapable sense of danger. A danger which may seem contradictory, this movie about sleep has some of its best moments happen in the harsh light of day – one, in particular, occurs in school with all the classmates present, invading a safe space with scant regard for conventions.

Tata’s movie is a humorous character drama where a high school boy mourning his family finds he has the power to visit the dreams of others and battles a killer witch in a space where the hero can’t die but the bloody thirsty and supremely powerful antagonist can – technically. This Horror movie about grief has floating demonic possessions and flowers that can imbue people with supernatural possibilities. Respati is all of this and more and, for sure, it’s messy. Yet in an age where studio horror is too clinical, this brand of adventurous weirdness really stands out. And while sure to divide opinion, Tata’s work feels fearless and less bound by convention, consequently, what he has produced here feels antidotal, and I’ll be filing that next to Tillman Singer’s Cuckoo.   

Rob’s Archive – Respati (2024)