Landmark After Dark

Presented by The Clay

and The SF International

Asian American Film Festival.

“A stylish and teasing chiller that unlocks a chamber of Freudian horrors, THE FORBIDDEN DOOR would make Hitchcock and Almodovar proud.”—Maggie Lee, Hollywood Reporter

The artist Gambir has a problem. His disturbing sculptures of children and pregnant women are overwhelmingly successful, but something isn’t quite right. He becomes further unnerved when the the message “help me” appears scrawled outside his front door, and soon over all of Jakarta. Getting to the bottom of that message will take Gambir (and the audience) down a sick and twisted rabbit hole of a plot, and finally to the one door in Gambir’s own house that he has never opened...

Indonesian director Joko Anwar follows up his cult favorite KALA (2007) with a horror film that considers no topic off limits, including abortion, rape, and child abuse. Like Gambir’s own art, the film’s impeccable style makes its content even more shocking. In the synthetic Jakarta constructed for the film, Anwar evokes an uncanny cityscape; characters are dwarfed by billboards (“Welcome to the Smiling Land”), while many of the interior spaces are private or practically empty. Anwar’s Jakarta is as nightmarish as Nicolas Roeg’s Venice in DON’T LOOK NOW, or Polanski’s Paris in THE TENANT, but Anwar seems less interested in keeping a cool distance than in pushing our collective buttons, and gleefully trades quiet dread for all-out gore when he goes for the gross-out. Come prepared: this is a film that’s unafraid to let its freak flag fly.

Indonesia 2009 115mins 35mm Color Indonesian w/E.S.

DIRECTOR/WRITER: Joko Anwar PRODUCER: Sheila Timothy CINEMATOGRAPHER: Ipung Rachmat Syaiful EDITOR: Wawan I Wibowo

MUSIC: Aghi Narottama, Bembi Gusti, Ramondo Gascaro CAST: Fachri Alba, Marsha Timothy, Ario Bayu, Otto Djauhari

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