JP Nunez
I’m a big fan of meta-horror. Whether it’s classics like Wes Craven’s New Nightmare and Scream or more modern gems like The Cabin in the Woods and The Final Girls, I love horror movies that comment on the genre itself. So naturally, when I heard that the Indonesian flick The Draft! was a meta-horror comedy with intentional genre stereotypes like “the jock” and “the pretty one,” it instantly became one of my most anticipated titles at Fantastic Fest. I couldn’t wait to see how it would poke fun at the overused cliches we all know and love, so when I finally got a chance to watch it, I jumped at the opportunity.
The Draft! was directed and co-written by Yusron Fuadi, and it stars Adhin Abdul Hakim, Winner Wijaya, Ibrahim Alhami, Haydar Salishz, Anastasia Herzigova, Putri Anggi Waluyo, and Ernanto Kusumo. In the film, five college students head out to an isolated villa for a weekend getaway, but as you can probably guess, they get a bit more than they bargained for. They quickly begin to experience strange and inexplicable phenomena, and they soon realize that a malevolent force has them in its crosshairs.
For about the first half hour or so, I was totally on board with The Draft!. For starters, this villa is a terrifying place even before the horror really kicks into gear. It’s dirty, creepy, and nearly abandoned, so it’s the perfect setting for a story like this. What’s more, the guy who takes care of the place gives off an eerie vibe as well, so right from the get-go, you can feel in your bones that terrible things are about to happen.
Then, when the evil entity starts to make its presence known, the movie gets even better. It’s almost non-stop tension as the characters frantically try to figure out what’s going on, but the clues don’t add up. These poor people simply have no idea what they could be up against, and neither do you. It’s the beginning of a great horror mystery, so I was on the edge of my seat just waiting to find out what could’ve caused all this chaos.
But unfortunately, that’s the film’s high point, and when we learn what’s really going on, The Draft! takes a steep nosedive in quality. I don’t want to ruin the story’s surprises, but I can say that at around the half-hour mark, one of the vacationers figures out what’s behind all these odd events, and the movie goes all in on the meta commentary.
This guy turns into Randy (from Scream) on steroids, and he goes into an overly long explanation of the evil that’s haunting them and how it’s connected to common horror tropes. He comments on everything from old music to random objects they found in the villa, and for my money, it’s just too much. It feels like the filmmakers are trying to impress you with how much they know about the genre, so it starts to get tedious after a while.
From there, The Draft! devolves into incoherence, and that’s when it completely lost me. Again, I can’t be too specific without spoiling the film, but I can say that it turns into an arbitrary hodgepodge of random horror cliches without any real rhyme or reason linking one sequence to the next. It becomes nearly impossible to care about the story, and even worse, you’ll eventually stop caring about the characters as well.
More specifically, you’ll soon realize that this movie has no stakes. It simply doesn’t matter what happens to these people, and if you know anything about my philosophy on horror films, you know I consider that a big mistake. If you’re not scared for the characters in a story, you almost certainly won’t be afraid of the horror you see on screen, and that’s exactly what happens here.
All that being said, the second two acts of The Draft! aren’t entirely bad. Most notably, they have a few good comedic moments, and for my money, two of them deserve special mention. First up, there’s a joke that centers around arguably the best Indonesian horror filmmaker today, Joko Anwar (the man behind Satan’s Slaves and Impetigore), and it drew an audible chuckle from me. Secondly, there’s a gag involving the difference between fast and slow zombies, and I thought it was pretty clever.
Unfortunately though, beyond those two moments, even the humor in The Draft! is lackluster. As you can probably guess, most of the jokes stem from the movie’s meta commentary, and since that commentary is way too on the nose, the humor never really has a chance to get going. It’s dead on arrival, and when you combine it with everything else this film does poorly, you get a subpar experience all around.
So if you get a chance to watch The Draft! sometime in the future, I suggest skipping it. Sure, the first half hour or so is excellent, but it’s all downhill after that. And as I said before, it’s a very steep decline. By the time the credits began to roll, I was just happy the movie was over, so I’m sad to report that as of this writing, The Draft! is my least favorite film at this year’s Fantastic Fest.
The Draft! played at Fantastic Fest on September 20, and it’s set to screen again at the festival on September 25.
