Please Keep the Door Shut

To call Joko Anwar’s latest neo noir as another ostentatious creative engulfment and compliance with the bits and tricks of the genre following his previous effort on superfluous Kala, would be understating the impression of a contemporary work that is trying to convey heavier moral duty of building awareness on child abuse as its main plot and not just a mere stylistic retro showcase of daily menaces and urban crime stories headlining yellow newspapers. The understatement of course may not be derived from such binary thinking that hard realistic themes only find its right place in drama film and not in a hard-boiled psychological thriller. It may, in other hand, be deduced from our own media consumptive culture with insatiable appetite for entertainment of trespassing voyeurism, excessive display of violence, and kinky sensationalism which the whole franchise is based upon to polish best with their overwhelming cinematic and artistic progress against dumbfounded creative writing and poor storyline.

The latter being closely guarded this time as the director/writer adapting from Sekar Ayu Asmara’s novel, improves the mood and coherency of the plot and characterizations tighter than canon loose Kala’s. Gambir is a successful sculptor with power and conscience issues as people surround him especially his wife and mother (as the very femmes fatales to align with the genre) live to control and ridicule the most of his masculinity, his impotence, and his trauma over his then-girlfriend abortion. Here the plot thickens to unbelievable subplots as Gambir keeps having mysterious remarks to save a boy from his abusive mother and a secret society exploitation that gives voyeur service (it is Sliver with per hour rate) to it as pure sick entertainment of all deviant activities in private rooms possibly recorded around the city; he entangles himself in a psychological limbo and dark sides of humanities only to find a forbidden door as his final answer to all the secrets hiding. Watching Forbidden Door is like waiting for Pandora, out of curiosity, opens the box and sets all evil in hell loose to the outside world, only to close it in time to keep Hope inside. Watching it closely, the story centres on Gambir’s relationship with the femmes fatales as part of the noir’s Pandora to stereotypically burn down the house and weaken the male hero. Gambir, played ever strongly by Fachri Albar emanates all the vertigo, delusions, sorrow, and later on cryptic anger after finding out the boy is dead; against quite unbalanced performances from shrilly Henidar Amroe as his dominant mother and lacklustre Marsha Timothy as Talyda, his overruling wife whom both have one mission in mind that is getting Talyda pregnant in anyway possible even if it means having it from his two best friends only to be watched rerun by Gambir through the voyeur service. And revenge is just around the corner for the massive gory contemplated killing field scene by the sculptor-turned-Jason.

Yet the prolonged twists, suspense and eternal exploitation of the traumatic childhood that keep you at the edge of your seat cannot help us but to shrug off and see in bigger picture that it may be just an impression of a false solidity with exaggerated storyline that craves more bloody theatrical scenes to push noir to its limit and fancy art direction only to keep (and be sacrificed for) the sensation of opening the mysterious gimmicky forbidden door (which we can actually already guess what’s behind it when Gambir shouts out loud the kid must live nearby).

It will be the harshest remark in this article to say that ironically and sarcastically, the film is laughing at itself with the audience. As it criticizes the very kernel of the faux pas of the society (even the term sounds pretentious), it also juxtaposes the characters (often in Dutch angles) and settings to meet the sense of noir with the retro urban lifestyle surrounded by minimalistic model houses and vintage furniture and plaza of swarming European old cafes and colonial buildings with tall columns and spiral staircases. Yet intrusive advertising approach from cigarettes and telecommunications provider sponsors fitted compromisingly to the set whilst the modern pink advertising billboard satirizes the good housewife picture from US Industrial revolution that intended to vibrate with all the femmes fatales’ characters in the film. The sense of out-of-place and out-of-time has become the eminent trademark of Joko Anwar’s, but Forbidden Door has a good alibi to be not in one group with all those video clip-like motion pictures with unrealistic and out-of-sync beautiful settings: all these wonderland props and plots are made up as the final twist from Gambir’s imaginations and cognitive knowledge built from all the magazines he reads in the asylum and re-enactment of his early childhood about the outside world and his alternative life will be if he did not kill his parents. To connect the dots, he is the kid (Oops).

Guess the best advice given in the movie comes too late at the last scene and most absurdly detached of all in the Church where Gambir shows up suddenly as a priest listening to a sinner who confesses murdering his wife, only later on he is advised to keep the door shut. Then the film closed with ambiguous shot of Virgin Mary statue praying (once again with Dutch angle), would she be deemed as the femme fatale too in this franchised thriller world?