Monster: the Indonesian Netflix thriller that tells a kidnapping story almost without words

Rako Prijanto’s Monster remakes the American horror film The Boy Behind the Door with two Indonesian children, a kidnapper’s house and almost no spoken dialogue, a gamble that hands the storytelling to sound, image and editing.

Monster starts from a situation every parent dreads. Two children, a girl and a boy, are abducted and taken to an isolated house. The girl, Alana, manages to get free, and instead of running for help she goes back for her friend, Rabin, who is still held by the adults who took them. What sets Rako Prijanto’s film apart from the many abduction thrillers that open the same way is a production decision made before a single scene was shot: the story is told with almost no spoken dialogue.

Monster is an Indonesian production from Falcon Pictures, written by Alim Sudio and directed by Rako Prijanto. Anantya Kirana and Sulthan Hamonangan play the two children, and Marsha Timothy and Alex Abbad play the adults they are up against. The film runs 84 minutes, had its premiere at a festival in Yogyakarta in November 2023 and reached Netflix worldwide on May 16, 2024.

Recommended Reading‘Monster’ (2004) – Series on Netflix

A remake of The Boy Behind the Door

Monster is a remake of The Boy Behind the Door, an American horror thriller written and directed by David Charbonier and Justin Powell. That film premiered at Fantastic Fest in Austin in September 2020 and was released on the horror streaming service Shudder in July 2021. Its premise is the same: two best friends, Bobby and Kevin, are kidnapped on their way home; one of them wakes up locked in the trunk of a car, frees himself and decides not to run away when he hears his friend screaming for help inside the house.

Falcon Pictures made two main changes for its version. The two boys of the original become a girl and a boy, so the child who escapes and turns back is now Alana. And one of the leads was rewritten as a character who cannot speak, a choice that, by the production’s own account in the Indonesian press, is what pushed the film toward telling its story without dialogue. The official synopsis keeps the rest of the frame intact: a desolate house, a girl who sets out to rescue her friend and a malicious kidnapper.

A thriller that gives up dialogue

Taking speech out of a genre film is less exotic than it sounds. Horror has always relied on what audiences hear more than on what characters say, and the last decade produced several thrillers built on silence or near-silence: Mike Flanagan‘s Hush (2016), about a deaf writer stalked in her house, Fede Álvarez’s Don’t Breathe (2016), set almost entirely inside a blind man’s home, and John Krasinski‘s A Quiet Place (2018), where a single sound can get a family killed. Monster belongs to that line, and it does not pretend to have invented it.

In a film that works this way, the job that dialogue normally does shifts to the other departments: sound design, music, editing and framing have to carry the information that characters would otherwise say out loud. That is the bet Monster makes on paper, and it explains why its craft credits matter more than usual for a commercial thriller of this size.

It is also a practical bet for a streaming release. A film with almost no lines travels across languages with less friction, since there is little to subtitle or dub, which suits a platform that sells the same title in dozens of countries at once. Netflix announced that it had acquired Monster in February 2024, as part of a wider slate of Southeast Asian titles, and released it three months later.

Rako Prijanto, from teen romance to a horror remake

Rako Prijanto, born in Magelang, Central Java, in 1973, came up as an assistant director to Rudi Soedjarwo and Riri Riza. He co-wrote the screenplay of Ada Apa dengan Cinta? (2002), a landmark Indonesian teen romance, and wrote the love poems of its hero, Rangga. He made his debut as a director with Ungu Violet in 2005.

He has since become one of the most prolific directors in Indonesian commercial cinema, moving freely between genres: the historical drama Sang Kiai (2013), which won him the Citra Award for best director at the Indonesian Film Festival, the comedies Warkop DKI Reborn 3 and Warkop DKI Reborn 4, the romance #TemanTapiMenikah (2018), an Indonesian version of the Italian hit Perfect Strangers for Prime Video (2022) and the horror film Para Betina Pengikut Iblis (2023), which got a second part in 2024. Remakes and local versions of foreign formats are familiar territory for him; in 2025 he directed Indonesian film versions of the Korean series A Business Proposal and What’s Up with Secretary Kim.

For Monster he worked again with the cinematographer Batara Goempar, who had been on the camera crews of his D’Bijis (2007) and Sang Kiai and who shot his Perfect Strangers. Batara Goempar has won two Citra Awards for cinematography, for Kamila Andini’s Before, Now & Then (2022) and Garin Nugroho’s Samsara (2024), and has shot several of Timo Tjahjanto‘s genre films, among them May the Devil Take You (2018) and The Big 4 (2022). The music is by Ramondo Gascaro, and the editing by Sentot Sahid and Iriani Irin.

Two child leads and two seasoned adults

A story without dialogue puts unusual weight on its two young actors, Anantya Kirana and Sulthan Hamonangan, who play Alana and Rabin. Facing them are two well-known faces of Indonesian cinema. Marsha Timothy, cast as the kidnapper Murni, won the best actress award at Sitges and the Citra Award for Marlina the Murderer in Four Acts (2017), Mouly Surya’s revenge western that premiered in the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes. She also starred in Joko Anwar’s The Forbidden Door (2009) and appeared in The Raid 2 (2014).

Alex Abbad, who plays Jack, started out as an MTV Asia presenter before turning to acting. International audiences may know him from Gareth Evans’s Merantau (2009) and The Raid 2, or from the HBO series Halfworlds (2015), and he won the Citra Award for best supporting actor for My Stupid Boss (2016). Both actors have worked with the director before: Marsha Timothy earned a Citra nomination for Rako Prijanto’s Merah itu Cinta (2007), and Alex Abbad was in the cast of his Roman Picisan (2010).

Festival premiere, Citra nominations and a global release

Monster had its world premiere at the 18th Jogja-NETPAC Asian Film Festival on November 29, 2023, competing for the festival’s Indonesian Screen Awards, before Netflix put it in front of a worldwide audience. At the 2024 Indonesian Film Festival it received two Citra nominations, for best editing (Sentot Sahid and Iriani Irin) and best visual effects (Dalang Kreasi): two technical categories, which fits a film whose stated ambition is to tell its story through image and sound.

The remake also travelled much further than its source. The Boy Behind the Door was a small American festival title that grossed about 128,000 dollars and found its audience mainly among horror fans on a niche service. Monster, by contrast, arrived on the largest streaming platform in the world, part of an Indonesian genre cinema that, since the international success of directors such as Joko Anwar and Timo Tjahjanto, regularly crosses its own borders.

Monster presents itself as pure suspense rather than a social drama about child abduction, and it makes no claim to be the first horror film to do without words. Its interest lies elsewhere: in how far a commercial director can push a familiar plot when he removes the tool most films reach for first, and in whether a story this bleak gains or loses tension when its characters have no voice to call for help.

Tags: Netflix

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