Scream (or even Wes Craven’s New Nightmare before it) has a lot to answer for. Since Wes Craven remoulded the slasher movie in a self-aware new form, meta horror has become ubiquitous. Filmmakers continue to delight in subverting the tropes and rules of the genre, and Indonesian director Yusron Fuadi is the latest to deconstruct a horror narrative. In fact, The Draft! goes further and offers a chaotic examination of the process of storytelling itself. The result is fitfully entertaining but gets overly caught up in the gears of its own mechanics, at the expense of a coherent story.

Five friends travel from Jakarta to an old Dutch colonial house deep in a forest in the middle of nowhere. It’s a sinister place, right down to the creepily avancular caretaker and a permanently locked room. It’s not long before one of their number is murdered. Yet when they disover him the next morning, not merely alive, but played by a different actor, the cine-literate group realise they’re at the mercy of an indecisive screenwriter with an anarchic case of writer’s block.

A jittery, jumbled trip through the tropes of Indonesian horror, The Draft! demonstrates a clear knowledge of, and love for, the genre. It most closely resembles the multi-subgenre romp of The Cabin in the Woods and the intentional amateurism of One Cut of the Dead with the kind of narrative dead ends and digressions prevalent in the literature of Laurence Sterne and Italo Calvino. It’s a lot messier than any of these but has more than enough scrappy ingenuity to keep fans of meta horror happy.

Once its real conceit is revealed, The Draft! stops aiming for any actual scares and contents itself with throwing as many genre nods at the wall as they can, moving onto the next without waiting to see if any stick. Despite a game cast, particularly Adhin Abdul Hakim as the reluctantly heroic Iwan, the constant shifting of focus makes it all feel weightless, with no stakes. These abrupt changes occasionally lead to some fine comedy – a horde of shambling zombies suddenly realising they can sprint, for instance –  but emotional engagement with any of the characters they do not.

The Draft! can’t be faulted for its ambition, but it’s just overly chaotic and unfocussed. The short runtime would allow for some leeway for some of its many, many ideas to be a little more fleshed out, or to allow some character beats beyond the stock archetypes the beleaugered protagonists recognise themselves to be. It also lacks the charcteristic full bodied genre nastiness of contemporary Indonesian genre practitioners like Joko Anwar (who gets a namecheck here), Kimo Stamboel, and Timo Tjahjanto. Fans of post-modern horror may get plenty milage from the postmodern craziness, but it lacks genuine scares and a real sense of satisfactory storytelling, which is somewhat ironic given the premise.

Available on digital platforms from Mon 27 Oct 2025