Netflix’s new action-thriller The Night Comes for Us, comes from the mind of seasoned merchant of death, director Timo Tjahjanto of Headshot and Killers fame. Possessing the same DNA as the recent barrage of white-knuckled Indonesian action films, Night is a balletic onslaught of flying limbs, whole and dismembered; this is cinematic violence par excellence.
Much
like its cousins of The Raid franchise,
what’s on display here is a royal pageantry of the Indonesian martial art
Pencak Silat. Night shows little
interest in rising above that mould. The cast (current flagbearer of Indonesian
action cinema Iko Uwais and Joe Taslim, both of The Raid fame) gamely throw themselves into every kick, slice and
parry. A magnolia display of athleticism of the highest order, every crackle,
gurgle and pop of bone rings true; Tjahjanto an outré surgeon of the sweet
science when steel meets skin. Indeed it seems as though his macabre
inventiveness left no stone unturned, finding new ways to maim, dismember or
otherwise injure with seemingly innocuous objects (an early sequence rendering
a butcher shop as an abattoir is a particular standout, only this time it is
the humans who are the meat). In a world where little has been done for
improvised violence ever since Jason Bourne first killed a man with a pen in
2002, Night offers more outlandishly
arranged deaths in one sequence than Hollywood can offer in whole trilogies. The
sheer excessiveness and indulgence towards bloodshed can at times border on
slapstick and parody, but this should be par for the course for dedicated
followers of Tjahjanto’s oeuvre. Pulses can drive from here.
The
film is structured much like a beat-em’-up video game and certainly features
the body count of one. Each sequence features a gamut of faceless grunts that
the irrepressibly agile and cutthroat protagonist can pound to an inch beyond
its life before facing off with a boss-like special character. With a rogue
gallery that contains deadly garrotte wire wielding French assassins, a
flamboyant butcher and a fallen angel ex-comrade who is an inverted double of
the protagonist, the film does at times resemble the work of Japanese maverick
mastermind Suda51, whose No More Heroes
bears more than a fleeting resemblance to Night.
Much
like a video game too, does Night falls
prey to what is termed as ludonarrative dissonance in the parlance of video
game theory. Broadly speaking, ludonarrative dissonance arises in the violation
of the aesthetic distance between narrative and gameplay; to wit, in the Uncharted franchise, hero Nathan Drake
is played off as a John McClane type in the narrative, a lovable everyman who
just happens to be caught in extraordinary situations. A set up that is
undermined severely by the player controlled segments of the game where players
are tasked with the casual slaughter of thousands of henchmen. It’s all by the
by really. A similar disjunction stymies Night;
I found myself at times, confused as to who to root for. A simple clash of
ideologies is presented at the heart of the film, Taslim’s veteran hitman Ito
has a late-career change of heart that has him suddenly valuing human lives,
literalized in the little girl shaped macguffin of Reina; Uwais’ Arian on the
other, is still mired in a bath of gangland violence and warfare due to his
misguided bid for power and status. Ostensibly, we are asked to root for Ito;
his quest for redemption is presented unambiguously as a positive one. However,
this stance jars against the film’s gleeful and cavalier attitude towards
taking lives. For a film that takes as much sheer delight as this one, glossy
and aestheticized in its careless dance of gore and sundry, it becomes
difficult to root for a hero whose very quest is predicated upon the sacred
preservation of life but seems to take the longest possible route towards the ending
of one. One might say Ito is meeting his fate on the path he took to avoid it,
but it could well be a mismatch of message and method. Here violence and death
are confectionery, a pick-n-mix grand buffet where each hit is dopamine sent
straight to the pleasure centres of the mind.
The Night Comes for Us
is ultimately a worthy new addition to the martial arts extravaganza of Indonesian action cinema that has surely become a new sub-genre. Action junkies
can sit assured in Tjahjanto’s jubilant and merry staging of his set-pieces. The
film is a Grand Guignol rigmarole of broken bones, exposed arteries and severed
limbs streaked in synth-cool neon lights. The actors’ hoary exhortations earn
them every blow and strike they deliver in this film, seemingly reaching out
from beyond the screen to remind you of its authenticity. Perhaps the question
to ask here is- just because we can tear a man asunder six ways to Sunday doesn’t
mean we should. What might the action genre have to offer us beyond pulse
quickening spectacle and viscera?
Review by Koh Zhi Hao