If you’ve ever wondered what it would feel like to get locked overnight inside a very long, very self-serious religious studies thesis, Grave Torture (Siksa Kubur) has you covered. It’s like someone looked at Indonesian horror’s hot streak and thought, “What if we did all the themes at once and then buried them alive?”
Joko Anwar’s latest has been hailed at home as a major event—17 Indonesian Film Festival nominations, the most of any film in 2024, plus big box office and instant debate.
Me? I left the movie feeling exactly like the title promised: tortured, and more than ready for the grave.
Killer Opening, Dead-On-Arrival Follow-Through
To be fair, the first 10–15 minutes slap. Multiple reviewers have praised the gut-punch prologue: a normal morning in a family bakery, then a suicide bomber walks in, hands over a cassette, “seeks refuge with Allah,” and promptly detonates, killing the parents and leaving siblings Sita and Adil orphaned with a tape full of screams labeled “Siksa Kubur.”
It’s brutal, it’s cinematic, and it sets up a sharp question:
If fear of grave torture can inspire that level of violence, what does that say about religion, justice, and human cruelty?
Great question. Shame about everything that happens after.
The film jumps from:
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childhood trauma,
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to abuse at a religious boarding school,
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to clerical cover-ups,
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to Sita’s adult crusade to debunk grave torture,
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to nursing-home melodrama,
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to a TV media circus,
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to copycat suicide bombers,
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to literal hell imagery.
By the hour mark, it feels less like a movie and more like a playlist called “Joko Anwar’s 50 Greatest Concerns.” Even sympathetic critics have called it intriguing but disjointed, with later events contradicting the premise laid out in that striking opening.
Sita: Final Girl or Walking Twitter Thread?
Faradina Mufti really tries here. Sita is introduced as a traumatised kid turned aggressively rational adult, working in a nursing home and secretly plotting a scientific smackdown of the entire concept of siksa kubur.
On paper, that’s a compelling protagonist: a woman who’s seen religious horror weaponised at every stage of her life and now wants proof that it’s all a con. In practice, Sita spends a lot of the film less as a character and more as a delivery system for arguments—about faith, about hell, about whether moral people need fear of punishment at all.
You can feel the movie wanting to be a complex treatise on modern Muslim anxiety, trauma, and gendered hypocrisy. Several essays note that it brushes sensitive topics—sexual abuse in pesantren, victim-blaming of women, the way fear of afterlife punishment becomes a tool of control.
But instead of dramatizing its ideas, the script often just states them. Out loud. For several minutes. Again. Sita debates Mr. Wahyu/Ilham, debates colleagues, debates herself, debates the TV audience. By the midpoint it’s less psychological horror and more that one friend who uses every group dinner to workshop their Medium article.
Overstuffed Plot, Underfed Horror
The movie keeps adding layers until it’s basically theological lasagna. You’ve got:
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The Ilham plot: rich school benefactor, serial abuser, now aging nursing-home patient.
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The grave-experiment plot: Sita plans to bury “the most ruthless man” next to serial killer Masbeth so she can record any grave torture on video, because ethics review boards apparently do not exist.
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The Pandi–Nani–Lali domestic soap, complete with washing machine death and jealous-husband melodrama.
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The séance subplot with Juwita, dead spouses giving murder instructions, and Adil’s ghost yelling “help Ismail” like a side quest prompt.
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The viral grave-recording craze that restores some people’s faith and also triggers more suicide bombings, because apparently nothing good can ever trend.
Any one of these could carry a solid 100-minute horror film. Together, they feel like four seasons of a prestige miniseries compressed with a hydraulic press.
The horror set-pieces themselves are often effective in isolation—the tunnel visions of disfigured Ismail, the claustrophobic burial, Adil hallucinating reanimated corpses in the morgue.
But they’re constantly competing with new characters, new rules, new sermons. The tension never gets a chance to build; it just resets, like the film’s own version of eternal punishment.
“Is It Real?” vs “We Just Showed You It’s Real.”
The biggest issue is that the movie keeps picking fights with itself. It starts by asking: Is grave torture real or just a religious scare tactic?
Sita’s whole arc is built around disproving it. She literally risks being buried alive with Ilham’s corpse to prove nothing supernatural happens after death.
Then the film… just shows us grave torture is real. Repeatedly. With zero ambiguity.
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The cassette tape from Masbeth’s grave.
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Other people’s recordings from cemeteries that capture screams and torment.
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The final sequence where Ilham is explicitly, graphically tormented by demons while Sita watches his flesh rip and regenerate on an endless loop.
As some critics have pointed out, the story starts by questioning the use of fear-based doctrine, then ends by validating the doctrine in the most literal way possible.
The message goes from “Is religion using hell to control you?” to “Actually hell is real, and our heroine’s big mistake was not believing hard enough.”
It’s like sitting through a two-hour argument, only for the film to stand up at the end and say, “Anyway, the opposite is true, thanks for coming.”
The Twist That Trips Over Its Own Grave
And then there’s the epilogue. After Sita’s insane night in the grave, her rescue, the hell loop, the repentance—boom: coda where Pandi and Nani are alive and fine, which heavily implies that Sita actually died the first night she was buried and everything after that has been her personalised hell.
Look, I love a good “was it all hell?” twist as much as the next horror gremlin, but here it plays like a last-minute attempt to justify the earlier chaos. Instead of deepening the story, it retroactively muddies everything:
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Were all those social consequences (viral grave videos, new bombings) just her torment?
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If so, why did we spend so much time treating them like real societal fallout?
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If not, why imply she’s been dead longer than the runtime of the film?
It’s less “mind-bending” and more “script notes from three different drafts accidentally left in.”
Prestige Horror, Meet PowerPoint Energy
The wild part is that this film is being positioned as capital-I Important: huge FFI presence, think pieces about Muslim anxiety and trauma, packed houses early in release.
And there is important stuff in here:
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it foregrounds sexual abuse and hypocrisy in religious institutions;
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it shows how fear of the afterlife can be twisted into earthly violence;
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it puts a complex, angry woman at the centre of a theological horror story.
Those are big swings, and I respect the ambition.
But ambition isn’t the same as coherence. More than one reviewer has basically landed on “interesting, but confusing and conflicting,” and it’s hard to disagree.
At times, Grave Torture feels less like a movie you watch and more like a movie that is marking you on your ability to keep up with its arguments.
Final Verdict: Eternal Punishment by Plot Outline
Grave Torture wants to be the definitive modern Indonesian religious horror: bold, layered, politically aware, emotionally devastating. Instead, it keeps tripping over its own gravitas.
There’s a lean, devastating film buried somewhere in here—a story about two siblings shaped and warped by weaponised faith, trying to prove a cruel god wrong and discovering something even worse. What we get instead is an uneven sprawl that pulls you into the grave, lectures you for two hours, and then explains that actually, the lesson is the opposite of what you thought.
Individual elements are strong: performances, some images that will genuinely haunt you, and a willingness to poke at sensitive topics most genre films would tiptoe around.
But as a whole? By the time the credits rolled, I didn’t feel enlightened, challenged, or spiritually shaken.
I just felt like I’d been stuck in my own version of siksa kubur:
buried under exposition, periodically jolted by a great scare, and repeatedly resurrected just in time for the next sermon.
