Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Monster’ on Netflix, a dialogue-free Indonesian horror-thriller (2024)

Indonesian thriller Monster has a generic title but a novel distinction: “This feature does not contain dialogue,” reads a Netflix disclaimer, which reads like the old “do not adjust your television set” notice you’d get when the broadcasting TV station would be experiencing technical difficulties. That leaves the onus on director Rako Prijanto to tell this remake/interpretation of David Charbonier and Justin Powell’s 2020 cult-horror film The Boy Behind the Door with images and sound, which requires some serious filmmaking savvy. Does Prijanto have it? Or will we be underwhelmed? Let’s find out.

MONSTER: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: The disclaimer is a lie: There are maybe a half-dozen moments when characters shout each other’s names. Otherwise, we’d never know that the sinister creep in this movie is named Jack (Alex Abbad), or that his kidnapping targets are a pair of adorbs schoolchildren doubled up on a bicycle, Alana (Anantya Kirana) and Rabin (Sultan Hamonangan). They’re still in their school uniforms when they drop into an arcade to lose a few coins in a claw machine. Rabin wanders off. Alana can’t find him. She walks out on the street and looks around and before you know it, Jack snatches her and duct-tapes her eyes and mouth and hands and tosses her in the trunk next to the wailing Rabin.

Jack takes them to an old house in the middle of nowhere. He grabs Rabin and leaves Alana sweating and screaming in the locked trunk. He chains Rabin to the wall of a bedroom, removes the duct tape, gives him a donut to nosh. Then Jack grabs a knife and, in an act of freaky intimidation, cuts himself on the wrist, next to a bunch of scars that look like tally marks. Ulp. Meanwhile, Alana somehow kicks the trunk open, hops out, scrapes the tape off one eye so she can see, then finds a nail to tear the bind on her wrists. Free! To escape – but not without Rabin. She summons some courage and sneaks into the house.

Now, this is when the movie begins falling apart, because Jack and Alana play a game of cat-and-mouse in which the cat senses there might be a mouse but doesn’t go check the car trunk to see if the mouse escaped. At first, he wanders through the house doing normal stuff – making some noodles to eat, playing video games, checking on Rabin – as Alana dodges and hides in cupboards that are full of gross co*ckroaches. Jack seems to suspect something isn’t quite right, and looks around here and there and around corners as if he expects to catch the cat misbehaving. Not the sharpest knife in the drawer, this guy. But there’s definitely a knife in the drawer should the plot need one – and a creepy room with a video camera set up by the bed, and an even creepier room with a chainsaw sitting on a big slab, which tells us Jack probably isn’t the type of benign kidnapper who’s going to order the kids a pizza and let them beat him at Mario Kart.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Don’t Breathe seems to be an influence, and Prijanto indulges a blatant reference to The Shining.

Performance Worth Watching: There isn’t much substance to any of these characters, but Kirana shows enough screen presence to be a fairly engaging miniature Final Girl.

Memorable Dialogue: “Jack!” – a character who shows up in the third act, or Rose in Titanic, take your pick

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Choosing the no-dialogue route obviously shifts the emphasis to visuals and sound, and the latter was marred by a strange ambient, ringing distortion that wasn’t present during instances of silence or diegetic music, but was painfully prevalent during moments featuring sound effects (e.g., a rumbling thunderstorm) or when the score ramped up. Whether it was a creative choice or a glitch in Netflix’s presentation, it’s terrible and annoying and it needed to stop (and I did adjust my television set, and try watching other content, and the noise was specific to just this movie. Odd).

Anyway. The sound issue wouldn’t be a gamechanger if Monster was smartly executed or conceived. It’s an admirable and ambitious idea, making a single-location horror-thriller without dialogue. I’ve long subscribed to the notion that a film needs to show more than tell to be a truly invigorating example of the form. Prijanto certainly exhibits some directorial acumen with a few clever shots and skewed angles, and occasionally generates suspense by fitting Jack and Alana into the same frame, knowing that if the former notices the latter, all hell will break loose.

Beyond that, however, Monster never sets its dramatic hook or has anything to say – there’s no subtext here at all beyond hey kidnapping and torturing children is bad! Again, that’s not a crime worthy of imprisonment in movie jail, but Prijanto struggles to create enough tension to keep us swept up in the moment. The film is mired in its own roteness: The horrible stuff doesn’t horrify, it fails to give us a firm sense of setting (a major problem in a single-location movie) and it suffers from a marked lack of logic, be it in the characters’ actions or its internal logic, the set of “rules” that persuades us to swallow certain contrivances instead of routinely poking holes in the plot.

Prijanto works his way through a series of generic incidents humorlessly and without the air of dread that permeates similar thrillers. He avoids overly graphic displays of violence, aiming for seep-into-your-bones suggestiveness, but the film’s method is frustratingly vague in its execution – the antagonist chases the protagonists and threatens them with weapons, and we never have a firm grasp as to why. In a remarkably boring way, this movie reminds us that bad people are evil. What a revelation.

Our Call: Great idea – dialogue is overrated! – but Monster offers no real surprises or suspense. SKIP IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.