Ghost In The Cell is expected to be released in select U.S. theaters this fall.
Joko Anwar’s Ghost in the Cell Makes an Indonesian Prison Even MORE Hellish, Somehow
Ghost in cell is a weird movie. It’s not exactly the most original premise for a horror film – supernatural shenanigans take place in a prison, where daily life is already nightmarish enough – but it does a few unusual and interesting things with the material.
The film comes to us from Joko Anwar, an Indonesian filmmaker who tends to make three or four films every year. He’s a bit like a cross between Roger Corman and Takashi Miike in terms of style. And substance; there’s this wacky, idiosyncratic humor in the proceedings, even when the film itself is supposed be a gore-a-thon to paint the walls red.
And Ghost in the cell This is definitely IT. The problem, actually, is when the film isn’t it. The disgusting special effects are so great that whenever the blood machine isn’t working at full blast, you tend to disappear from the narrative. That’s a bit of the problem when you shoot a film, especially a horror film, in an environment where almost all characters are disreputable, unsympathetic and sometimes categorical homicide people. You can’t wait to see most of these assholes get their guts smeared on the linoleum, but with 15-20 minutes between each spectacular kill, you have to make do with them. just take up space.
Anwar is obviously trying to make some sort of social commentary here. Maybe it’s a movie about inefficiency about Indonesia’s mass incarceration system, or corrupt bureaucracies, or what happens when you literally let the inmates run the asylum. Of course, unless you actually live in Indonesia and understand the hot-button socio-political issues of the day, you’re probably not I’m going to get a lot out of the story. Not that it’s a unwatchable film in this regard; indeed, in a way, a film like this works better without any valuable cultural commentary in the mix.
You may remember a late 80s horror film called Prison. GOOD, Ghost in the cell – and if you don’t get the intrinsic joke, you definitely need to watch more anime – is pretty much a spiritual remake of this film. If Anwar saw Prison or even knowing that it exists in the first place is a sort of aside; Thematically, the story is the same, but in terms of execution, they are VERY different films.
The “villain” of the film is difficult to explain. It’s more of a spectral force than a character, a bit like in Smile or the Final destination movies. To make it short, When the invisible supernatural presence appears, guts and blood invariably follow. He somehow becomes a body horror film at times, but most of the violence is traditional splatter comedy hokum. Even when the most depraved and reprehensible characters are filmed in vivisection, it’s bizarre. playfulness to all this; there is a touch of old school Sam Raimi and Peter Jackson, but with a more delicate sense of humor.
This is perhaps the biggest problem with Ghost in the cell. The film obviously has a lot of comedic overtones, but not all of the jokes translate equally well. It’s a film that tends to aim for the lowest common denominator, with lots of tired and clichéd jokes about “dropping the soap.” Yet even when we have a somewhat sympathetic character to root for – and even then, it’s a bit difficult to find him. totally friendly – you never really care whether he or anyone else in the film survives the assault. It’s the same thing that hindered Alien 3 from the start; if you want to give us a supporting cast of murderers, rapists and child molesters, who cares if they get their heads ripped off?
You kind of know where the movie is going…until it turns go in a completely different direction. Indonesian horror is kinetic like hell and Anwar is not happy just giving us comedic influences. There are plenty martial arts sequence in the film which is essentially The Raidif the casting of this film only had brooms and kitchen utensils available as melee weapons. And believe it or not, there is a LONG interpretive dance sequence – with some unfortunate homophobic connotations – which ends with a rather inventive death scene (no spoilers, but it involves the simultaneous merger and bifurcation of two semi-central characters.) Oh, and just wait until the prison cook gets possessed, grabs cutlery and… well, that East A horror film at heart, isn’t it?
Okay, then Shawshank Or The green line this movie is not. Eventually, the inmates and guards have to join forces once they figure out what’s going on, but the grand finale isn’t very impressive. In fact, it sort of ends on a subversively laid note – like, some sort of insinuation about prison conditions actually improved once all the supernatural killings started. Surprisingly, this movie has a LOT of similarities to Paddington 2 … at the point where I am convinced that the director MUST use it to base certain elements of his film.
It’s hard to say Ghost in the cell is a good film in its own right, although it’s obviously not bad. It’s one of those genre pictures where the highs are very high but the lows are very weak. When the movie gets crazy, it’s extremely entertaining, but when the tempo slows down and try to force some exposition and character development on us, it becomes a real chore to do. Still, good outweighs bad here and that’s definitely something different in an area where we have had a plot of stereotypical and repetitive material lately.
You might like Ghost in the cell, you might hate it. But you can at least appreciate his aspirations…even when those aspirations are totally impossible to explain or understand, moreover.
GIVE A WATCH IF YOU LIKE: Ernest goes to prisonBong Joon Ho before he got all serious and lecturing towards us, any of the old Splash House video games
DIRECTOR: Joko Anwar
WRITER: Joko Anwar
WITH : Endy Arifian, Abimana Aryasatya, Yoga Pratama, Mile Lucock
STUDIO: Come see photos/Rapi Films/Legacy Pictures
DISTRIBUTER: CGC Films
LANGUAGE: Indonesian
RUNNING DURATION: 106 minutes
RELEASE DATE: October 2, 2026 (limited theatrical release)
