Intensity 🩸🩸🩸🩸.5 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
Directed by Joko Anwar
What if you mashed up Cool Hand Luke, Midnight Express, Escape from Alcatraz and added extreme gore, mayhem, and a dash of empathy? Well, put simply, you’d get one of the best prison films ever, Ghost in the Cell.
The latest film from, well, the best horror director alive, Joko Anwar, is another exceptional offering from an artist that just can’t miss. Creating a melange of gore, violence, brutality, and comedy — yes, comedy — Anwar has developed the prefect antidote to awful prison fare like Escape Plan (Sylvester Stalone and Arnold Schwarzenegger), Human Centipede 3, and Ilsa She Wolf of the SS. Not just a great prison film, but a top ten horror film for 2026.
Mind you, this is not your average prison, nor is it your average prison tale. Anwar creates an almost Giallo-like complexity around a tale that follows a young journalist who’s been imprisoned for killing his editor.
The journalist, Dimas (Endy Arfian), is dilligently working on a story involving deforestation and environmental malfeasance at the hand of a nickel mining operation. Unfortunately, when reporting on the story, a rage-filled ghost that was manufactured as a result of assault on mother nature, decides to attach itself to Dimas.
Where Dimas goes, the ghost goes — including to the deepest and dankest depths of an Indonesian prison.
Once out on the prison year, AKA the judgement field, Dimas is immediately befriended by a rag-tag group of fraudsters, thieves, scammers, and reprobates. Dimas, however, is none of these things. His weak and frightened behavior immediately ingratiates him with this loose crew of prison pals, led by their charismatic leader, Angorro (Abimana Aryasatya). It’s Anggoro that keeps the group calm in the face of the ghost, and who also brings a solemn figurehead quality, not unlike Seong Gi-hoon from Squid Games.
Anwar creates a wonderfully written and performed cluster of troubled men trying to contend with through the pitfalls of prison life. The group’s cluster becomes even tighter when one of their members, Six (Yoga Pratama), realizes that his migraines aren’t just headaches, but they’re actually a siren call that allows him to recognize individuals’ auras and ghosts.
The ghost from the woods has followed Dimas to the prison and feeds off the prisoner’s auras, and in particular, their anger. Infamously, why do you rob banks? For money. Where’s the best place to find anger and malcontent? Why a prison of course.
The ghost’s appetite quickly pivots to wildly elaborate mutilations that are punctuated with a symmetrical and artistic flair. Each mutilation is worse than the last, but all involve an implement being forced out victim’s mouth. A shower head, an oven flame, and well, you get the idea.
The group quickly surmises that the prison population is a veritable smorgasbord of hatred and they have precious little time before the ghost reorganizes their organs across the prison yard.
Standing in their way is Tokek (Aming Sugandhi), a tattooed freak hellbent on sodomy. A prison warden more concerned about the optics of an out-of-control prison population and his chance to become a deputy minister. And Rendra (Yuhang Ho), the hardened drug dealer only looking out for his best interests.
The film culminates in a fascinating, but hopeful, mixture of philosophical concepts, man’s inhumanity towards man, and the emotions that truly motivate us in life. As the film marches towards its conclusion the gore and the body count quickly ratchets up in unimaginable ways.
Should you see Ghost in the Cell?
Western audiences have slept on Joko Anwar for far too long. His visionary approach to horror is truly one of a kind and there are few horror directors that currently hold a candle to him — or for that matter — have ever held a candle to him.
Ghost in a Cell is another masterclass in horror storytelling. Not just the sometimes off-putting Indonesian mythology and traditions, but the ability to perfectly balance over-the-top gore with comedy and companionship. While all of Anwar’s films do take on a certain complexity that requires audiences to stick with the story, this is a film that is able to harmoniously weave in and out of sheer terror and laugh out loud punchlines.
Ghost in the Cell is rated TV-MA and in theaters everywhere. Ghost in the Cell is on Digital October 27 and it will be anding on 4K Ultra HD/Blu-ray Combo Pack November 17 from Well Go USA.