General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

Impetigore

Impetigore (Indonesian: Perempuan Tanah Jahanam) is a 2019 Indonesian folk horror film directed and written by Joko Anwar, in which a young woman who travels to her ancestral village hoping to claim a house she may have inherited discovers that the community has been trying to locate and kill her to remove a curse that has plagued them for years.¹ It stars Tara Basro as Maya, Marissa Anita as her friend Dini, Ario Bayu, and Christine Hakim, runs 106 minutes, and was a co-production of Indonesia, South Korea, and the United States.¹^•² The film was Indonesia's official submission for the Best International Feature Film category at the 2021 Academy Awards and won six Citra Awards, Indonesia's national film honors, from a record 17 nominations.³

Key fact	Detail
Original title	Perempuan Tanah Jahanam; the English title plays on impetigo, a skin infection that affects children¹^•⁴
Director and writer	Joko Anwar, following his horror hit Satan's Slaves (2017)²
Lead cast	Tara Basro as Maya (also credited as Rahayu), Marissa Anita as Dini, Ario Bayu as Ki Saptadi, Christine Hakim as Nyi Misni¹^•²
Runtime and production	106 minutes; produced by Indonesia, South Korea, and the United States; language Indonesian¹
Critical reception	92% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer from 38 reviews; 80% Popcornmeter; 6.6 on IMDb⁵^•¹
Awards	Indonesia's official 2021 Oscar submission; 17 Citra nominations with six wins, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Supporting Actress for Christine Hakim³
Festival	Screened at the Sundance Film Festival in 2020, a rare invitation for an Indonesian genre film⁶

Spoilers

Plot and setting

Maya works nights as a toll booth collector in the city when a stranger attacks her with a machete, knowing her name and the village she comes from, of which she herself knows nothing because she never met her parents.⁶ She travels with her best friend Dini to the remote village of her early youth, hoping to claim a family estate she may have inherited.⁶^•⁷ There they find standoffish locals, a village eerily devoid of children except for those buried in the nearby cemetery, and a community ruled by a shadow puppeteer and his enforcer, with Maya's family past bound to a curse the villagers may need her to lift.³^•⁶

The film opens with a toll booth sequence that critics repeatedly singled out. Peter Sobczynski, a critic at RogerEbert.com, called it an absolutely spellbinding opening sequence, and The Reelness described it as absolutely terrifying and shockingly realistic.²^•³

Cultural elements

Anwar built the film around Javanese traditions rather than Western horror conventions. The plot makes wayang kulit shadow puppetry essential to the story, and the film also incorporates gamelan music, the Javanese traditional house, and kejawen, a Javanese philosophy applied in everyday life through symbols and rituals.⁵^•⁸ Anwar said the inspiration came piece by piece: he had been fascinated since childhood by the craft of shadow puppets, which are made with great detail but shown to the public only as shadows, and his brother once told him the puppets were made of human skin rather than cow hide, an image that terrified him.⁹ The Reelness reports that he based the screenplay on his own nightmares as well.³

The script was finished in 2010, and the film took about ten years to reach the screen, partly because Anwar could not find the right locations. The crew spent three months searching for a village resembling the one in the script and settled on a settlement cut off from the modern world, where they built the infrastructure they needed and left it for the villagers.⁹^•¹⁰

Reception

Critics broadly praised the atmosphere and craft. Sobczynski rated it 3.5 out of 4, calling it an uncommonly effective film that is smart and provocative in addition to being all kinds of creepy.² GameSpot's Dan Auty scored it 8 out of 10, praising it as visually stunning and atmospheric with a fascinating use of Indonesian traditions, while faulting lengthy expository flashbacks that hurt the story.¹¹ Dennis Harvey in Variety called it a handsome and atmospheric production that is good, sometimes grisly fun that is not terribly scary, particularly once the hectic climax proves less suspenseful than the slow-burn buildup.⁵

The ending divided reviewers. Several noted that the final act turns to heavy explanation and escalating gore: Sobczynski criticized an extended flashback dropped in just before the climax and an epilogue with a tacky shock moment, while The Reelness described a clumsy dream sequence and an unintentionally comical, melodramatic ending.²^•³ Even so, Celluloid Score called it one of the best Indonesian horror films of its generation and a landmark of modern Indonesian horror, rating it 4 out of 5.¹²

Awards and significance

At the Festival Film Indonesia in 2020 the film received a record-breaking 17 Citra nominations and won six, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Supporting Actress for Christine Hakim, who also won the equivalent prize at the Festival Film Bandung and the Indonesian Movie Actor Awards.³^•¹³ It was chosen as Indonesia's official 2021 submission for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film.³

Writing in Inside Indonesia in 2026, Andrea Decker traced the recent Indonesian folk horror renaissance to this film, which was followed by KKN di Desa Penari (Work Study in Dancer Village), the highest-grossing film in Indonesian history. These films draw on East Java settings, Javanese village art forms, and kejawen spiritual practices to explore the friction between modernity and tradition and the vulnerability of outsiders entering an isolated community.¹⁴ Anwar himself described Impetigore as a love letter to the psychological horror films that dominated Indonesia in the 1970s, in a genre that makes up about a third of the Indonesian film market.¹⁵

Availability

In the United States the film streams on Shudder and AMC+ and can be rented or bought on Amazon Video, Apple TV, and Fandango at Home.¹^•⁵ Shudder released it on Blu-ray with an Indonesian soundtrack and English subtitles.⁷

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Horror films (individual works) › Folk horror films

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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