Joko Anwar’s Ghost in the Cell makes an Indonesian prison even MORE hellish, somehow
Ghost in the Cell is a weird movie. It’s not exactly the most original premise for a horror movie — supernatural shenanigans are afoot at a prison, where daily life is already nightmarish enough — but it does a couple of 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 movies every year. He’s kinda like a cross between Roger Corman and Takashi Miike in terms of style and substance; there’s this wacky, idiosyncratic humor to the proceedings, even when the movie itself is supposed to be a paint-the-walls-red gore-a-thon.
And Ghost in the Cell is definitely THAT. The problem, really, is when the movie isn’t. The gross-out special effects are so great that anytime the blood machine isn’t worked into overdrive you tend to fade out of the narrative. That’s kind of the issue with setting a movie, especially a horror movie, in an environment where almost all of the characters are unsavory, unlikeable and sometimes flat-out homicidal people. You can’t wait to see most of these jerks get their guts scrambled on the linoleum, but with 15 to 20 minutes in between each spectacular kill, you have to make do with them just occupying space.
Anwar is obviously trying to make some sort of social commentary here. Maybe it’s a movie about the ineffectiveness of the mass incarceration system in Indonesia, or corrupt bureaucracies or what happens when you literally let inmates run the asylum. Of course, unless you actually live in Indonesia and have an understanding of the hot button sociopolitical issues of the day, you’re probably not going to get much out of the story. Not that it’s an unwatchable movie in that regard; indeed, in some ways, a movie like this works better without any highfalutin cultural commentary in the mix.
You might remember a late ‘80s horror movie called Prison. Well, Ghost in the Cell — and if you don’t get the intrinsic joke there, you definitely need to watch more anime — is pretty much a spiritual remake of that movie. Whether Anwar has seen Prison or even knows it exists in the first place is kind of an aside; thematically the story is the same, but in terms of execution they are WILDLY different movies.
The “villain” of the movie is hard to explain. It’s more of a spectral force than a character, sort of like in Smile or the Final Destination movies. Long story short, when the invisible supernatural presence shows up, guts and gore invariably follow. It kinda becomes a body horror movie at times, but most of the violence is traditional splatter-comedy hokum. Even when the most depraved and reprehensible characters are getting vivisected on camera there’s this weird playfulness to it all; there’s a touch of old school Sam Raimi and Peter Jackson going on, albeit with an iffier sense of humor.
That might be the biggest issue with Ghost in the Cell. The movie obviously has a lot of comedic overtones, but not all of the jokes translate that well. It’s a film that tends to aim for the lowest common denominator, with plenty of tired and cliched jokes about “dropping the soap.” Yet even when we get a somewhat sympathetic character to root for — and even then, it’s a bit hard to find him totally likable — you never really care if he or anybody else in the movie survives the onslaught. It’s the same thing that hobbled Alien 3 from the outset; if you’re going to give us a supporting cast comprised of murderers, rapists and child abusers, who cares if they get their heads chomped off?
You kinda know where the movie is headed … until it veers off into a totally different direction. Indonesian horror is kinetic as hell and Anwar isn’t content just giving us comedy influences. There’s a full on martial arts sequence in the movie that’s basically The Raid, if the cast if that movie only had brooms and cookware available as melee weapons. And believe it or not, there’s a LONG interpretive dance sequence — with some unfortunate homophobic overtones — that concludes with a pretty inventive death scene (no spoilers, but it involves the simultaneous fusion and bifurcation of two semi-central characters.) Oh, and just wait until the prison cook gets possessed, grabs some cutlery and … well, it is a horror movie at heart, isn’t it?
OK, so Shawshank or The Green Mile this movie isn’t. Eventually the inmates and the guards have to join forces once they figure out what’s going on, but the grand finale isn’t too impressive. In fact, it kind of ends on a subversively staid note — like, sort of an insinuation that conditions at the prison actually improved once all of the supernatural slayings got underway. Amazingly, this movie has a LOT of similarities to Paddington 2 … to the point I am convinced that the director HAD to have based some elements of his movie on it.
It’s hard to say Ghost in the Cell is a good movie, per se, although it’s obviously not a bad one. It’s one of those genre pictures were the highs are very high but the lows are very low. When the movie is going crazy it’s immensely entertaining, but when the tempo slows down and it tries to force some exposition and character development on us it becomes a real chore to sit through. Still, the good outweighs the bad here and it’s definitely something different in a realm where we’ve been getting a lot of formulaic and repetitive material lately.
You might like Ghost in the Cell, you might hate it. But you can at least appreciate its aspirations … even when those aspirations are totally impossible to explain or understand, for that matter.
GIVE IT A WATCH IF YOU LIKE: Ernest Goes To Jail, Bong Joon Ho before he got all serious and preachy on us, any of the old Splatterhouse video games
DIRECTOR: Joko Anwar
WRITER: Joko Anwar
STARRING: Endy Arifian, Abimana Aryasatya, Yoga Pratama, Mile Lucock
STUDIO: Come and See Pictures/Rapi Films/Legacy Pictures
DISTRIBUTOR: GSC Movies
LANGUAGE: Bahasa Indonesia
RUNTIME: 106 minutes
RELEASE DATE: October 2, 2026 (limited theatrical release)
