Fantastic Fest 2024 ‘The Draft!’ Review – A Basic Outline of Wishy-Washy Horror
The Draft!, aka Setan Alas!, is an Indonesian horror film from co-writer and director Yusron Fuadi. The film follows five everyday 20-something college students as they go on vacation to a remote villa.
The group of friends includes Ani (Putri Anggie) and her boyfriend Budi (Haydar Salishz), a film nerd named Iwan (Adhin Abdul Hakim), the tomboy Wati (Anastasi Herzigova), and the meathead of the group Amir (Winner Wijaya).
The power is out at the villa as soon as they arrive. A caretaker that they jokingly refer to as Uncle (Ernanta Kusuma) makes the villa even creepier as he always seems to be lurking around, just out of sight. As they settle in things only get more uneasy and disturbing. Then the following morning they wake up to a murder.
The Draft! has four credited writers and it feels like a film that is written by several different people. The concept of the film is that a screenwriter is attempting to write a horror movie, but the characters in the film are not only trapped in the villa, they are also trapped within the writer’s first draft.
It’s incredibly ambitious and perhaps too much for a little independent film with no budget to take on. The Draft! starts with a supernatural tone where the villa hints at being haunted, but changes pace as a serial killer is on the loose.
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Once two corpses turn up, Iwan figures out what’s going on. The film makes drastic transitions whenever the writer throws away or burns a page. Dead characters are suddenly resurrected and what was once a slasher or a ghost film is now suddenly about zombies.
The visual effects in the film are the bottom of the barrel. There are green screen effects that are Birdemic levels of bad. There’s a scene where Iwan and Wati are supposed to be on a cliff during the day. The bright sky filled with clouds is the green screen background and the brightness from that background is somehow projected onto the skin of the actors.
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The characters in the film somehow alter the story by yelling things out in the film. The writer can hear this and works it into the story, which doesn’t make sense most of the time. The writers also choose to make their lack of character development or a story with any depth part of the storyline.
So The Draft! is constantly pointing out how purposely shallow it is. It feels like Yusron Fuadi and the other writers were trying to do something explosively meta, but the result is annoying and underwhelming. The Iwan character especially becomes an obnoxious know-it-all who still succumbs to the film’s concept despite his so-called knowledge.
The writing of the film backs itself into a wall The Draft! can never fully break through. These characters acknowledge that they’re imaginary and their fate is at the whim of someone who exists in our reality.
The writing eventually hits an impenetrable glass ceiling where authors and screenwriters give in to writer’s block, but how long a story goes unfinished is totally up to the writer – leaving the story and characters in limbo. The Draft! addresses this by bringing it up and not going anywhere further with it.
The Draft! is the type of film that is too clever for its own good. A mind-blowing concept is restrained by limited funds, weak acting, writing that is all over the place, and a film that never decided what horror genre to place itself in, so it chose all of them.
The “humor” in the film is every character trying to out-bitch one another as they typically whine about everything. There are no memorable kills and the characters are all unlikeable. The Draft has a smidgeon of something promising squandered by a plethora of indecisive individuals.
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The Draft! (2024), Akasacara Film
PROS
- A brilliant concept
CONS
- Everything else
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