“Smothered” or the original translation of the Indonesian title “The Dark Legend of Malin Kundang” (2025) adapts and updates an Indonesian folklore tale whose moral is to instill filial piety. You do not need to know about this folktale to understand the story, but it is probably better if you do not look it up until after the movie ends if you are too curious to stay away. Set in 2025, Alif (Rio Dewanto) is a husband to his childhood sweetheart, Nadine (Faradina Mufti), whom he knew for eighteen years starting at the age of fifteen (a fact that will be repeated several times), and father to his beloved son, Emir (Jordan Omar). They live financially well in the capital of Jakarta. After eighteen years apart, Aminah (Vonny Anggraini) arrives and introduces herself to them as his mother visiting from a small village in West Sumatera, but he does not recognize her and is suspicious. If he uncovers the truth, will he be able to live with it? Not billed as a horror, but as a psychological thriller, it will be appearing on Shudder. Though the movie is repetitive and drags out a bit too long in some places, it lands as truly disturbing with an ouroboros-esque narrative structure reminiscent of Karyn Kusama’s “Destroyer” (2018) and begs for an unlikely rewatch considering the challenges of an initial watch because of the content (compliment).
The broken clock rule even applies to Matt Damon who claimed that Netflix asks screenwriters to repeat plot points in the dialogue three to four times so people can play with their phone while watching a movie. “Smothered” suffers from that problem, and all of the characters except for Alif are written like glorified prose dumpers though none of the actors exhibit impatience or frustration over the reiteration of facts and mostly treat it like new information. If you are a viewer who actually pays attention, it may have the opposite intended effect: function as a distraction from the story and bring attention to the fact that you are watching a movie instead of becoming so immersed that you forget that it is not real. In terms of emotional tone, the actors counterbalance this issue, so their performance will keep the audience invested, but the combination makes the movie more melodramatic and a soap opera than it otherwise would be if the writers gave the audience a bit more credit.
Adding to the theatrics, amnesia plays a big role in “Smothered.” Alif was in a car accident, and he is better than ever. The main tension is if he would be a worse person if he recovered his memories. Mufti’s face tells all about the state of the on-screen couple’s marriage before it is revealed in the denouement. Dewanto’s acting style screams green flag, and when security or dashcam footage shows him prior to the accident, it is almost as if he has a doppelganger. He seems like a completely different person. Omar is a natural actor and never confuses playing a sweet, open and loving little boy with being cutesy or stagey, which translates as fake and off-putting and is a plague that infects many child actors. Emir’s character is the most effective at portraying how his home life made him yearn for a more loving atmosphere. Once grandma arrives, it is as if whatever remaining cobwebs rested on the family got shaken off, and the sunshine came in, which is why she would not ordinarily be suspicious if not for all the unusual phenomenon that Alif experiences.
At the beginning of “Smothered,” Anggraini presents her character as the perfect grandmother, then her final onscreen appearance makes her seem as if an entirely different person is playing the role. It is wild and perfectly complements Dewanto’s style throughout the movie. Their characters’ trajectory is not the same, but it is an intriguing dance between the two. When Alif decides to investigate whether this woman is his mother, the story gets challenging to follow. It will help if you ask when and where he is. It starts a long middle act where the audience is just as in the dark as Alif about what is going on as he visits unfamiliar places and meets scores of people in a seedier part of town, but it is a cake walk before he decides to return to his hometown.
The film’s oneiric elements increase as it approaches the denouement. Alif keeps hearing disembodied voices of people and seeing images that are not there, specifically a woman’s face being pushed into a taut, gauzy curtain. He has a repeat nightmare of his face screaming into a cracked mirror. If these out of context scenes are disturbing, wait until you find out the complete picture forms. Even in the unlikely event that you pick up all the clues and figure out exactly what is about to happen, first time codirectors Rafki Hidayat and Kevin Rahardjo’s execution is unsettling. While it is not in the same vein as Seventies exploitation flicks that depict quotidian scenarios in a prurient, sensationalist fashion, they do shock the audience and throw them into a horrifying world because the casual cruelty is so routine and prevalent in the real world. These scenes contain the eeriness of a haunting without literal ghosts, and if the film was billed as a psychological horror film, it would have earned it even though no supernatural elements are involved.
Because “Smothered” spent so much time in the investigation portion of the story, it curtails the fallout of Alif’s discovery and creates an ambiguous question. Asking when is he seems to be crucial because it feels as if the movie starts at the beginning before jumping forward a year. It leaves the audience with the question of whether Alif has fully integrated this experience, is ignoring his discovery, what is real or if he is just pretending to have the life where he is loved, not the one that came before. Do I want to know enough to rewatch the movie more than once? No, thank you. It is not a scary movie, but it is not the kind of movie that you want to spend more time with if you do not have to. If you have the stomach for it and come up with definitive answers, please feel free to reach out, but that kind of content knocking around your noggin feels as if it should come with a warning label.
“Smothered” is not exactly a movie that you can enthusiastically recommend because of its flaws and its high points. It is a disturbing descent into discovering a creative’s Rosebud and verging on an exploitive peek into the real-life tragedy that many face when confronted with poverty and survival. The bedrock of the protagonist’s motivation is a well-worn trope, but it is still such an affronting one that it remains effective.
