The Shadow Strays Review: Kill Bill meets John Wick from Indonesia Brutal, Bloody, and Cool
Cast: Aurora Ribero, Hana Malasan, Taskya Namya, Agra Piliang, Andri Mashadi, Adinia Wirasti, Kin Wah Chew, Adipati Dolken
Director: Timo Tjahjanto
Streaming Platform: Netflix
Filmyhype.com Ratings: 4/5 (four stars)
The Shadow Strays is an action movie from Netflix Original Indonesia. It is the story of a female assassin who bonds with a boy she just met, but a criminal organization captures him. She hunts down and kills everyone who gets in her way, even the teacher who created her. One thing is for sure: anyone who watches even a few minutes of a Timo Tjahjanto film cannot help but notice his extraordinary ability to direct action scenes. Raw, violent, and intense, his hand-to-hand combat, whether with guns or knives, has a rare brutality, visceral energy, and ferocity unique in its genre. Not even the John Wick saga manages to match this level of choreographed violence, where bodies are destroyed in a bloody and relentless dance, although the characters, miraculously, continue to stay standing much longer than is humanly possible.
With The Shadow Strays, this Indonesian action master – who already gave us the splendid The Night Comes to Us – stays true to his formula, mixing breathtaking fight sequences with his usual dose of extreme violence. If you imagine a sort of John Wick with Indonesian women brandishing Uzis and samurai swords and adding even more brutality, you are pretty close to what this film offers. The Raid, although directed on Indonesian soil by Welshman Gareth Evans, has shown in its time what local cinematography can achieve in terms of spectacularity and adrenaline in the field of choreography, taking martial arts action films to another level. There are a series of old and new local talents who have given and continue to give their contribution to the cause with films that focus precisely on the aforementioned component. One above all is Timo Tjahjanto, a cult director famous for his acrobatic and very violent action films, who with his new effort behind the camera entitled The Shadow Stray, distributed by Netflix on October 17, 2024, after the preview presentation at the Toronto International Film Festival, has further reiterated the concept.
The Shadow Strays Review: The Story Plot
The film opens with a spectacular action sequence in the first 20 minutes: a Japanese yakuza leader ignores the warning of a dangerous organization of assassins, known as “The Shadows”, who are on his trail. One of the members of this mysterious group arrives and massacres almost all of the Japanese mafiosi, but a moment of distraction, due to the accidental killing of an innocent woman, leads to him being wounded by gunshots. Another “Shadow” intervenes to save him and kills the yakuza leader. Only at this point is it revealed that both assassins are women. This sequence serves as an introduction to a plot that becomes even more complicated. The protagonist, called “13” (played by Aurora Ribero), is only 17 years old and bears this name as a number assigned to her by the organization she belongs to. The woman who saves her, Umbra (Hana Malasan), is her superior and, after the mistake made by 13, sends her to Jakarta to rest.
Umbra only asks her to continue taking pills, which suppress her feelings and empathy, making her a more effective killing machine. 13 tries to follow the rules, despite suffering from nightmares and insomnia, until his life is turned upside down when he witnesses the murder of a neighbor by gangsters, leaving his eleven-year-old son alone. When the boy is kidnapped by the same mafia, or so it seems, 13 decides to intervene, despite not having received the official assignment. From that moment, he embarks on a mission to find the boy’s whereabouts and, along the way, faces an ever-expanding mafia organization, where bosses answer to other bosses, in an infinite chain of criminal power. 13 will have to eliminate all his enemies one by one, step by step. Will he succeed in his intent?
The Shadow Strays Review and Analysis
In The Shadows Strays the director aims for a melodramatic epic, putting the protagonist in front of a series of increasingly intricate challenges. As we said, the action scenes of Tjahanto are not for the faint of heart: facial explosions, flying body parts, rivers of blood, slashes and close-range shots make the experience visceral and overwhelming; this somewhat nihilistic approach of the script, in which the world is cruel and goodness is not necessarily rewarded, gives a bittersweet note to the action. The villains represent different spheres of corruption in the government: the entire system is rotten, and the only answer is violence. This rottenness seems all too close to reality, especially if we consider that so many impunities are denounced every day in the world: this feeling is also contributed to by the fact that the violence does not have an artificial aesthetic, but rather realistic, which even makes you shiver, almost approaching horror.
In addition to the action choreography, photography, and editing, the makeup work also deserves applause. Protagonist 13 undergoes a process of deterioration as the fighting progresses: the bruises and wounds accumulate, and the makeup knows exactly how to convey to us the sense of this progress. The Shadow Strays is not afraid to tone down its protagonist; on the contrary, it injects realism into the cruelty of its world by letting us see her scars or her eye swollen from the blows: we have the feeling that at any moment she will no longer be able to take another punch. It is interesting how Tjahjanto enjoys stretching out the sequences, an aspect well represented in the fight of the true ending, where the characters, after so many blows, suffer facial deformations typical of horror. When one of them states that the violence unleashed will never end, a further reference to this concept is added. In line with this game towards extension, The Shadow Strays features several endings: a prolonged resolution, the true ending, and an epilogue that, in addition to connecting to the theme of the “endless end”, paves the way for a sequel that, we are sure, we will see very soon.
Compared to his previous The Big 4, in which action continues to be a main ingredient of the recipe but mixed with a decidedly lighter and more playful register, The Shadow Stray marks the filmmaker’s return to the graphic and brutal violence of The Night Comes Upon Us and Killers. The violence reaches peaks of gore and splatter when the choreography is replaced by the ferocity of the horror background that the author has frequented on more than one occasion with May the Devil Take You and the episodes he signed off the anthologies V/H/S and The ABCs of Death. The encounter between these two modes of staging explodes in an action film with no holds barred, where the red of every blade that pierces the unfortunate person on duty and of every bullet that reaches the target is projected on the surfaces and the screen leaving indelible marks. What unfolds before our eyes is a hyper-violent show based on crime-action-thriller-revenge-horror, in which martial arts are the fuel that powers the engine, leaving mutilated corpses, severed heads, and hectolitres of blood on the ground.
In short, lovers of strong pleasures, as well as martial arts action, will have plenty to sink their teeth into. This will make them, just like it happened to us, remain glued to the sofa at home every time words turn into action: from the one-on-one of the first minutes to those in the apartment, from the break-in and subsequent escape from the club to the fight in the shed in the Cambodian forest, up to the overdose caused by the exhausting showdown in the headquarters. The devastating and impactful power of these scenes, amplified by Tjahjanto’s direction and Dinda Amanda’s editing, which bring to mind the South Korean The Villainess by Byung-gil Jung and the Thai Chocolate by Prachya Pinkaew, become the fulfillment and expression of the protagonist’s journey of revenge, here played with a convincing and surprising physical presence and involvement by the actress and singer Aurora Ribero.
The revenge we are talking about is the one consumed by the young assassin 13 who, after being removed from her duties following a mission that almost failed, decides to help a boy who has lost his mother at the hands of a criminal organization. When he disappears, the protagonist develops a destructive plan to find him, even if this means betraying her mentor and the organization she works for. A plan that will trigger a chain reaction of events that will lead her to scatter bodies in Jakarta prey to drug traffickers, greedy policemen, and corrupt politicians. And it is against this army of criminals that 13 will unleash his blind fury. If in the framing The Shadow Stray has a lot to show, it is in the writing that instead reveals its shortcomings. This phase presents the same defects as many previous ones, starting from a plot reduced to the bone, where there is room for futile digressions, dialogues too elementary, and the plots of characters barely outlined. This ultimately results in a timeline that turns out to be excessively long and dilated compared to real dramatic needs.
With The Shadow Strays, Indonesian director Timo Tjahjanto returns to the graphic and brutal violence of his cult films, exponentially increasing their ferocity with peaks of gore and splatter. The result is spectacular and impactful action scenes, but also quite bloody, which find their maximum expression in the choreography. The direction and editing act as the engine and sounding board for a ballistic and martial show that excites and injects massive doses of adrenaline into the viewer. Too bad that all this ends up being the exciting package of a story lacking in content and emotions. The only ones that remain in the end are those arising from the tense moments where facts take the place of words. A round of applause goes to the lead actress, a truly convincing Aurora Ribero in all phases of the timeline, even the weakest on a dramatic level.
The good thing is not just the action scenes, but the world structure of this story is also well thought out. It is not stuck in Indonesia by having an assassin organization called Shadows (in the story, there are many names, but they all mean the same thing) accepting jobs without any morality all over the world, which allows this story to cross over to any country. It is also easy to find co-funds and the action scenes can start fresh without having to lay much groundwork. But the story does not abandon the drama content by having the main character 13 have a past problem from his childhood that is shown many times in the same short scene, which is a knot connecting to the past of the heroine’s teacher again. This makes this part of the story click logically at the end, even with all the small dramas along the way, such as the insertion of the treacherous Shadow Team in the middle of the story, with a small knot hidden as a mystery that the story intentionally left behind related to the red pill that the organization ordered the heroine to take (it should be revealed in the next part), including the insertion of supporting characters to add drama that is connected to the heroine, such as the low-class gangsters that the heroine beat up at the beginning, who later became important characters.
The film inserts small dramatic scenes, but it has more impact than having to tell and build up a lot. Like the scene where 13 and the kid whose mother was recently killed eat noodles, which quickly bonds the two of them. When you finish watching, the whole story is connected to why the heroine is looking for this kid. It’s like John Wick, who isn’t just a dog but is worth more than that. The movie succeeds at this in the same way. In addition, the villains of the story also have distinct identities, such as the rogue police who wear a transparent mask with patterns to cover their faces when doing dirty work, like The Purge, the villainous leader who is the son of a politician who has to wear a wrestling mask when doing evil deeds (which also helps to hide his stiff acting). The movie makes these villains more distinctive and scarier at the same time, with a fight scene that is appropriate and ends with an extremely brutal scene. These people don’t have to work out to be muscular movie stars like many movies like to create characters like this. This movie follows the role of the characters themselves, which seems much more fitting.
The Shadow Strays Review: The Last Words
The Shadow Strays is a bloody action epic that is both gripping and emotionally draining and will satisfy those looking for an adrenaline-filled viewing experience. An Indonesian action movie that can be compared to Hollywood movies. It’s like John Wick + Kill Bill. The story has locations in many countries. The action scenes and camera angles are cool, cool, and exciting. There’s endless bloodshed. The villains have unique and outstanding characters. There’s still a bit of drama in the story, but it’s done well enough. It makes the characters bond in a short time. It also sets up a plot for sequels and franchises. It’s like an Indonesian version of John Wick. I recommend that you don’t miss it!
The Shadow Strays Review: Kill Bill meets John Wick from Indonesia Brutal, Bloody, and Cool - Filmyhype
Director: Timo Tjahjanto
Date Created: 2024-10-17 18:32
4
Pros
- The mastery with which Timo Tjahjanto films the action
- A protagonist who gives it her all, destroying herself on stage
- The very realistic subtext that we feel close to
Cons
- The extended duration could drive away viewers
