BIG BAD FILM

Is The Night Comes for Us the most violent movie ever made? Six years since audiences first lost their minds over Timo Tjahjanto’s relentlessly brutal, blood-soaked action-slasher opus, Big Bad Film Fest gives you the chance to settle the debate once and for all — by watching every chaotically gory, expertly calibrated minute of next-level carnage play out where it’s always belonged: on the big screen.

Rivaled only by another set of Indonesian martial-arts masterpieces (The Raid: Redemption and its sequel, by his friend Gareth Evans) in its beautifully executed action choreography and over-the-top bloodletting, Tjahjanto’s film pits Raid stars Joe Taslim and Iko Uwais against one another — not to mention an armada of enforcers, assassins, and death-dealing “operators” — in a gangland showdown for the ages.

After Triad enforcer Ito (Taslim) massacres a village and meets a young survivor (Asha Kenyeri Bermudez), a crisis of conscience leads him to turn on the other Triad soldiers present; this, in turn, brings the larger crime syndicate down on his head, forcing Ito to battle legions of heavily armed thugs, as well as old friend Arian (Uwais), who’s tasked with killing both Ito and the girl.

From there, The Night Comes for Us descends into the Indonesian criminal underworld as if into the deepest realms of hell, Tjahjanto pushing his action-horror aesthetic to merciless extremes in one bone-crunching sequence after another. But what sets the film apart from The Raid and other recent action epics of repute is Tjahjanto’s sadistic sense of humor. As the intensity of the action ratchets up from one location to the next — apartments, nightclubs, factory floors — every inanimate object in reach is reimagined as a weapon of mass destruction; and as the bodies pile up, Tjahjanto playfully tips the action over into wince-inducing slapstick. 

Creatively choreographed by Uwais, The Night Comes for Us never runs out of steam in part because of this devilish dime-store ingenuity, a Tjahjanto trademark. Look no further than a butcher-shop brawl where Ito confronts Triad soldiers, enlisting hooks, machetes, cleavers, power saws, and even a cow femur to eviscerate his enemies, or a vicious warehouse fight around a pool table where a billiard ball is deployed with shattering force. 

And that’s only the sequences with Taslim — The Night Comes for Us reaches a bloodthirsty apogee as a femme fatale known as The Operator (Julie Estelle, previously seen brandishing claw-hammers in The Raid 2) contends with assassins Alma (Dian Sastrowardoyo) and Elena (Hannah Al Rashid), sidestepping Elena’s gleaming kukri and Alma’s razor-sharp piano-wire (plus the bodies of those she’s already dispatched, littering the hallways to darkly hilarious effect). Together, they form an anti-heroic trio worthy of Johnnie To.

Across the four features he’s directed to date, and three co-directed with Kimo Stamobel (as the Mo Brothers), Tjahjanto has honed the art of cinematic overkill, upping the ante by orchestrating one burst of ultraviolence after another until there are no skulls left to splinter, no arteries left to gash. Alternating between no-holds-barred action and demented splatter horror, Tjahjanto infuses his films with gallows humor, a more-is-more view of viscera, and a gift for pushing the envelope further into extremity than other filmmakers working at his level would dare. 

A grindhouse-guignol specialist at heart, Tjahjanto made his name in Indonesian horror with Macabre, about friends who encounter a family of cannibals; co-directing with Stamboel, he paid tongue-in-cheek tribute to The Texas Chain-Saw Massacre with shots from the chainsaw’s point of view. On bleakly funny slasher Killers, the Mo partnered teamed with Night cinematographer Gunnar Nimpuno, whose feverish lighting and immersive camerawork refined Tjahjanto’s visual style. And on Headshot, starring Uwais and Taslim, the Mo Brothers applied their balls-to-the-wall sensibility to a martial-arts brawler, shooting handheld to drop audiences in the blistering heat of each fists-of-fury beatdown. 

Headshot was the clearest glimpse of the havoc ahead for Tjahjanto; it’s another showcase for Taslim’s judo expertise and the pencak silat martial-arts style Uwais popularized in The Raid, plus Night scene-stealers Sunny Pang, Zack Lee, and Julie Estelle. But Tjahjanto’s brand of go-for-broke lunacy is equally evidenced by V/H/S/2 segment “Safe Haven,” a found-footage freakout co-directed with Evans, and his deliriously ghoulish May the Devil Take You duology, paeans to Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead that unleash buckets of blood and geysers of black bile.

In its high-impact violence and gross-out gore, The Night Comes for Us unifies Tjahjanto’s action and horror bona fides in the purest distillation of his hard-hitting aesthetic to date. To behold the film’s frenzied climax, as Taslim and Uwais scrap for supremacy on a factory floor, maximizing the flesh-flaying potential of every object — screwdrivers, box-cutters, shards of glass — they encounter, is to witness not only two martial-arts legends in their prime but also a filmmaker who’s never been more ferociously in his element. -IF

Isaac Feldberg is an entertainment journalist currently based in Chicago, who’s been writing professionally for nine years and hopes to stay at it for a few more.