In the fluorescent glare of a rundown Indonesian wig factory, vats of human hair simmer in huge cauldrons, stirred by hunched laborers as rows of mannequin heads watch blankly from the dark.
Indonesian auteur Edwin has spent much of his career examining the quiet absurdities of modern life with a cool, deadpan detachment. But with Sleep No More, premiering in Berlin’s Special Midnight section this week, the director makes a headlong plunge into horror — infusing the genre with black comedy and a pointed critique of humanity’s slavish worship of capitalism. The film marks Edwin’s return to Berlin, where Postcards From the Zoo screened in competition in 2012 and later earned him the Edward Yang New Talent Award at the Asian Film Awards. For the new feature, he takes his cue from Jordan Peele, using the scary movie not just as spectacle but as a vehicle for uncomfortable social satire.
“I never worked with this genre before,” Edwin says. “So we thought, let’s have fun with it — but not by doing a horror based on ghosts, like most Indonesian scary movies. We want to create the ambience of horror, but not in the usual way.”
“I was quite inspired by Jordan Peele, who has a strong message in his horror movies,” he adds. “So it was almost an automatic response for me to talk about capitalism. Peele also says that the only difference between horror and comedy is the music and the sound design, so it felt very natural to put some comedy in there too.”
The result is a surreal and darkly comic tale set inside a decaying industrial wig factory, where workers are pushed into punishing overtime shifts by the manipulative incentives of an exploitative lady overseer. When exhaustion overtakes them, something more sinister comes creeping from the shadows. Rumors spread that a ghostly presence preys on the sleep-deprived, seizing their weakened bodies. Two sisters investigate the mysterious death of their mother, while their younger brother — gifted with an uncanny ability to heal — becomes a target for whatever’s lurking in the factory’s bowels.
The premise plays with the supernatural, but Edwin insists the film’s true horror is its everyday economic realism.
“Labor exploitation and inhuman working conditions are a fact of life in my country,” he says. “It is not improving; it is getting normalized to the extent it becomes horrifyingly absurd. When I travel in Jakarta, you see tired people everywhere,” he says. “On the street, on the bus, on the train — everybody seems like really zombied-out, exhausted from working.”
That image — everyday workers so worn out they resemble the undead — became the core of Edwin’s idea for a horror film steeped in social realism. But the setting provided the movie’s macabre imagery.
While scouting factories, Edwin and his collaborators visited a functioning wig factory in Bali, where entire families labor together crafting elaborate hairpieces for international export. The factory’s labor-intensive production processes — pots of boiling hair, workers weaving locks onto battered, blank mannequin heads, others combing the wigs with pallets covered in sharp metal spikes — provided an environment already so palpably creepy it needed little embellishment.
“The factory actually exports its wigs to Broadway,” Edwin recalls. “But when we talked about it with the workers, they didn’t even know what Broadway is. They don’t care. They just work and work — they have to.”
That classic capitalist disconnect — the alienation of the worker from their labor — fascinated him, and gave him the confidence that his premise would have universal resonance.
“Working so hard in very routine conditions without knowing what it is actually for,” Edwin says. “Maybe all of us, in some way, are doing that.”
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