Deadly Love Poetry

(Puisi Cinta yang Membunuh, aka Deadly Love Poem, Garin Nugroho, Indonesia, 2022)

A woman in the foreground of a frame watches events unfolding in a room; suddenly, hitherto hidden by her own figure, her double enters the scene, and catastrophe ensues.

Is this a tricky horror-mystery-thriller by Dario Argento or Brian De Palma? No, it is the extraordinary, unexpected gesture of Indonesian master Garin Nugroho (Opera Jawa, 2006), marrying his penchant for other-worldly fantasy with myriad devices of popular genre.

This tale of an enigmatic serial killer within the worlds of art and high fashion owes much to the global form of the giallo. Nugroho, however, reveals this framework to be entirely accommodating of Indonesian mythology and spirituality.

Masks, snakes, clothing fabrics, trance-dances … the entire iconography takes on a renewed, vibrant meaning here.

Likewise, modern criminal psychological profiling sits comfortably alongside the intergenerational traumas of family life and cultural constraints.

With its non-stop music score and ever-mobile camera – not to mention a colour and design scheme that will blow your mind – Deadly Love Poetry stands as an exhilarating corrective to the snobbish current trend of “elevated horror”.

Nugroho respects the traditions, old and new, and whips them into an unforeseen, intoxicating delirium.

Sad to say, it appears to have passed almost without notice. After a brief theatrical run in Indonesia, it popped up in the Rotterdam Film Festival of 2023 – but was lost (at least, judging by the critic-reports I perused, which were fixed on the half-dozen usual auteur suspects) in the typically overcrowded program.

On IMDb, there are two dismissive ‘user reviews’, both by people who didn’t make it to the end! And it has subsequently been sold to Netflix, so good luck (depending on where you live) trying to find it streaming there, down in the subterranean, Chthonic depths of its algorithm.

© Adrian Martin 8 December 2022 / 22 January 2024