Indonesia is an enchanted culture filled with folklore involving ghosts, demons, and djinns (shape-shifting spirits from Arabian and Muslim mythology).
These stories often involve an ethical of some kind: Do not leave a house unattended, for this invites the dwelling of demons. Always respect the elderly, lest they return to haunt you. Settle squabbles inside your loved ones, or their spirit will fail to transition to the afterlife resulting from unresolved conflicts on earth. Always come home before nightfall, because sunset signals the thinning of the barrier between the spiritual and the physical realms.
It is not any wonder that on any given week, horror movies dominate the Indonesian box office. A powerhouse of the genre, director Joko Anwar (The Forbidden Door,Satan’s Slaves, and Impetigore) recently gave the remainder of the world one other taste of elevated Indonesian horror with Netflix’s Nightmares and Daydreams.
The seven-episode series offers an authentic take a look at how stories of the supernatural are woven into Indonesian culture and performance as acute social commentary. Western audiences could be tempted to interpret Nightmares and Daydreams in a demythologized fashion—as if the supernatural elements of the series merely serve to attract audiences to contemplate the perennial social problems that plague Indonesia, or more specifically, Jakarta. Yet the supernatural and social issues actually coalesce in a way that echoes reality.
In particular, Nightmares and Daydreams reminds us of a pre-Christian culture, during which desperate characters turn to not God or the church for understanding or deliverance but resort to the occult or supernatural for relief, with devastating consequences.
A running theme of the series—during which each episode is its own short story in a loosely connected universe—is that desperate situations result in desperate decisions. These decisions could possibly be an ethical compromise to chop corners, which leads the supernatural to punish the character, or an invocation of the supernatural in hope for deliverance.
For instance, “Old House” depicts a taxi driver named Panji with a dilemma: Should he proceed to look after his cognitively declining mother or send her to a retirement home with a price tag that seems too good to be true? It’s a matter heavy on the minds of many in Indonesia, because the country lacks a stable social security plan for pensions or inexpensive retirement homes. Aging parents expect to be taken care of by their adult children.
It will not be unusual in Jakarta for 3 or 4 generations to live together in a single home or in the identical neighborhood. The cultural assumption is that when children are married, they are usually not sent off to form a family unit of their very own but are somewhat enlarging the present families. There is less emphasis on the notion of boundaries between married and single adult children: All remain under the authority of essentially the most elderly member of the family, and everybody has obligations to maintain the elderly.
So when a way of desperation drives Panji to maneuver his mother to the retirement home, it’s not a surprise that he faces punishment for neglecting his traditional role and caving in to his sense of despair. The retirement home seems to be run by a monstrous cult that seeks to use them.
Many episodes focus on characters living in dire poverty. In “The Orphan,” a grieving couple sets their hopes on a magical orphan boy, rumored to have the power to bring about great wealth to those that maintain him and death to those that abuse him. “Encounter” focuses on a fisherman named Wahyu (Indonesian for “revelation”) and a village facing eviction. After Wahyu snaps a photograph of an angel, villagers hope to avoid forceful expulsion by leveraging the rare item. Both episodes highlight the gross inequality between Jakarta’s powerful wealthy and oppressed poor and the ways in which the poor are vulnerable to further exploitation.
In “Poems and Pains,” Rania, an writer who’s struggling to maneuver beyond her successful novel on abuse, is herself supernaturally involved with a girl facing severe domestic abuse. The episode reminds audiences that abusers in Indonesia rarely face consequences resulting from the dearth of legal pathways available for victims, and yet Indonesians are enthralled by such scandals as a type of entertainment.
Other episodes tackle the necessary role fathers play, exploring what happens when a father is absent in addition to how a father’s decisions can impact his family. “Hypnotized,” as an example, sees a desperate father resort to theft by hypnosis (an increasingly common phenomenon in Indonesia) to offer for his family, only to seek out that his family has followed in his footsteps, with tragic results. The responsibilities one has toward the family looms large within the conscience of this show.
The spirit-filled world of Nightmares and Daydreams reminds Christians of the unique hope we’ve got in Christ amid broken systems and desperate situations, and of the redemptive influence of the Christian faith throughout the context of the traditional world.
Like Indonesian culture, the Greco-Roman world during which the early Christians lived was polytheistic—filled with magical rites, pilgrimages, and idols. Christians were viewed as disrupters of faith because they rejected those practices and believed Jesus Christ was the climactic revelation of the one Creator God. He had addressed our ultimate problem of sin and defeated the powers, putting them to shame on the cross. Christianity was thus a demystifying, anti-superstitious religion.
Instead of seeing a myriad of spirits and powers behind each event or location, the Triune God is now seen because the agent of windfall, who works through secondary causes, and can’t be manipulated by human decisions.
Instead of invoking assistance from the gods or spirits for one’s own ends, Jesus calls his disciples to emulate the God who didn’t count divinity a thing to be exploited but who humbled himself, taking the shape of a servant (Phil. 2:6–7). He calls us to take part in the divine work of caring for “the least of those” (Matt. 25:40), considering the poor and marginalized blessed (Matt. 5:3–11), and taking good care of the widow, the orphans, and people who cannot look after themselves (James 1:27). The church, subsequently, ought to be an agent of mercy in times of great desperation.
The horror genre is a reminder that we are usually not on top of things, that we’re vulnerable, and that we live within the “present evil age” (Gal. 1:4). Asian horror, specifically, often reveals a spiritual porousness that resists the secularization of the trendy West, and Nightmares and Daydreams is not any exception. It reminds us that the world will not be yet fully leavened by the anti-superstitious influences of the Christian faith and that the church ought to be a salve, in order that those in desperate situations needn’t turn to the demonic to seek out relief.
The show also displays in acute ways how Indonesian culture—which prioritizes family, traditional gender roles, and openness to the spiritual—continues to be stricken by sinful and broken conditions. Such cultures need the biblical witness just as much as secular contexts that prioritize autonomy, careerism, and resistance to any notion of enchantment.
Like many anthologies, the entries in Nightmares and Daydreams vary in quality. “Poems and Pains,” “The Old House,” and “P.O. Box” (which was directed by Anwar himself), stand out as the very best. The acting can occasionally be overly theatrical or stilted, the computer graphics limited and at times sketchy, and the exposition too obvious. Some of the episodes could possibly be trimmed into 30-minute vignettes as an alternative of hour-long dramas (especially “Encounter” and “Hypnotized”). It’s also not for everybody, because the series comprises disturbing themes involving violence, monsters, spirits, cults, and abuse.
Yet, for Christians, it reminds us that the cure for social ills will not be to maneuver from secularism to spiritualism, from autonomy to family values, from liberalism to conservatism (or vice versa). Instead, it’s to change into more captivated by the unique hope we’ve got in Christ, who calls us to be agents of mercy and reconciliation to a world that desperately needs it.
