The Draft!

Fictional characters discover agency and get a life of their own in Yusron Fuadi’s self-aware horror comedy.

“This script is getting worse.”

I wasn’t personally too hot on the 2011 horror comedy darling The Cabin in the Woods. It felt smug, with an inflated ego for being so cutting edge and smart. It wasn’t badly written or anything, just was not as unique a take as I think the filmmakers were claiming. Horror has been self aware for decades, for better or worse, and the trend is growing as films like Final Girls, Dawn Breaks Behind the Eyes and Censor see box office popularity.

 As every culture’s horror landscape is unique – more or less – it’s good to see how different countries play with their own film tropes. Sure, there’s a lot of overlap (don’t wander alone, don’t read ancient books), but occasionally you get something unique. Apparently, in Indonesia, Sudanese traditional music screams horror, such as is the case in the 2025 Indonesian horror The Draft!.

The Draft!, which I will now write without the punctuation to save me some formatting headaches, tells a classic story: five friends (, each filling a different Breakfast Club-esque personality niche, travel to the Indonesian equivalent of a cabin in the woods: a villa in the jungle. There, they meet the creepy housekeeper (Ernanto Kusumo), who gives vague warnings, and in the morning one of their own – handsome jock Budi (Hayday Salishz) – is found dead.

As the cast attempt to flee it becomes apparent, thanks to wannabe director Amir (Winner Wijaya), that they are in fact just characters in the first, frankly awful, draft of a struggling screenwriter’s attempt at a horror film. Despite this knowledge, however, the gang are largely powerless against their capricious god, whose constant script revision make it impossible for the cast to keep up.

The thing about The Draft is that, unlike say Cabin in the Woods or just about any horror, the characters have precisely no way to do anything about their predicament. There is no in-universe threat for them to confront, just an all-powerful being who can set fire to the whole script and start over whenever he wants. This provides the filmmakers a bit of difficulty in giving the main characters any sort of agency.

Through the savvy Amir, however, they are able to use the movie’s lack of logic against it, and it’s then that The Draft really finds its footing. It’s a shame that it takes so long to get to that point. Once zombies start showing  up, Mir asks Ani where her father used to keep his weapons of war, moulding reality to his desire. It’s the sort of thing that makes you question who’s in charge of writing this script, but it starts to move so fast you’re not given much choice but to enjoy the ride.

You can’t really spend too long thinking about the logic of the film, but sometimes a story requires that from its audience. The cleverness in forcing the scriptwriter to address his own insecurities to save themselves is a genius move. “No way you’d be able to get 3,000 extras!” Amir shouts, planting enough doubt for the writer to scrap the entire plot point. It’s clever, but like many in the genre, it isn’t massively funny or scary. It’s a delicate balance, and one that it doesn’t often strike. I wish I had laughed more, but nevertheless I was still engaged with what the characters were doing.

It obviously raises a lot of questions of the characters’ motivations and actions. Writers often talk about the characters acting of their own accord, with the writer acting only as a note-taker, and I guess that’s what’s happening here. But at the same time, it’s impossible to tell how long the in-film story takes place, considering the writing process takes the screenwriter years (for what still amounts to a truly basic, generic horror film). The Draft is a movie that asks you to ride along with its cast, who all do a phenomenal job by the way, and save your questions till the end.

Assuming, that is, that this poor movie ever does get written.

Verdict: Skirting between clever concept and inscrutable nonsense, The Draft! is a fun, occasionally messy film that manages to be knowing without being insufferable.

Overall entertainment: 7.5/10
Violence: 6/10
Sex: 0/10
Budi: Can’t catch a break, poor guy
Ways to survive an Indonesian horror film: there are like 12 steps, but the best one is at the end, telling the characters to force revision after revision from the screenwriter.

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The Draft! (2025)
Also known as: Setan Alas!
Indonesian

Director: Yusron Fuadi
Writers: Anindita Suryarasmi, Yusron Fuadi

CAST

Adhin Abdul Hakim – Iwan
Anastasya Herzigova – Wati
Anggi Waluyo – Ani
Haydar Salishz  – Budi
Winner Wijaya – Amir
Ibrahim Alhami – The other Budi
Ernanto Kusumo – Uncle Dadang

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