A New Martial Arts Action Spectacular from the Director of THE NIGHT COMES FOR US
No one keeping up with modern action cinema will be surprised to learn that The Shadow Strays, the new film by Timo Tjahjanto, is a masterclass in limb-snapping, skull-pulverizing, blood-geyser-ing (totally a word) cinema. Tjahjanto wields brutality like a painter does their brush, amazing and delighting his audience with his seemingly limitless ideas for how to reduce nameless goons into puddles of red meat on screen. While The Shadow Strays perhaps never quite becomes the cinematic endurance test that Tjahjanto’s masterpiece The Night Comes For Us did, it nevertheless exists in that odd intersection of action/horror that Timo has made his home base.
But while anyone turning up for another buffet of blood and bullets will be happily rewarded by The Shadow Strays, now on Netflix, what amazes about the new film is less its capacity for carnage (which is, again, apparently inexhaustible) but its command over quiet, calm, and character.
Tjahjanto long ago proved himself incredibly adept at building relentless cinematic rollercoasters. What’s perhaps most surprising, then, about The Shadow Strays is that this is a movie that does relent, that forces the rollercoaster to a standstill to instead dwell on sorrow and loss in a way that doesn’t distract or detract from the martial arts pandemonium but instead enriches those kinetic elements. Strays has blood to spill in abundance, but it also has an aching soul and a heart that refuses to stop beating no matter how often it gets broken.
The gauntlet gets dropped right from the jump, with Tjahjanto kicking his epic off with a twenty-minute sequence that functions as its own short story. We’re told in text about a secret organization known as ‘shadows’, a clan of highly trained assassins that never fail a mission. No one knows who hires them or what agenda they serve, only that whoever they target ends up dead, no exceptions. In the prologue, we watch a single ‘shadow’ sneak into a heavily fortified hideout and decimate the guards inside with enough spraying fountains of gore to make Kill Bill blush. And just when you think the set-piece has exhausted itself, the operative is compromised after a moment of compassion for an innocent bystander and a second ‘shadow’ intervenes. With a machine gun. That’s the kind of intervention ninja-assassins deal in.
Right from the get-go, Tjahjanto undercuts his own malevolent sense of play by prefacing the bloodbath with the main henchman stepping outside to take a call from his young daughter, who wants to know when her dad is coming home. In the grand scheme of the movie, this character objectively does not matter. He exists only to be the point of view character to bring us into the facility and establish the situation and layout before the shadows break in and start repainting the interior with head-splatter. He will not survive past the twenty-minute mark, and even so Tjahjanto stops the movie cold to underline that this is a person with a life that is going to evaporate for reasons they probably don’t understand at the hands of two people who definitely don’t know why they’re doing it. Even the nameless characters have names in Timo Tjahjanto’s films, and this film is shot through with a sense of melancholy that so many are going to die with those names unspoken.
But the movie proper kicks off when the cool ninja armor comes off and we discover that the sword-wielding super-killer is a teenaged girl known only as 13 (Aurora Ribero, who by all rights should be a movie star after this). Her mentor in ninja massacres is Umbra, (Hana Malasan) who is none too pleased that 13 allowed concern for an innocent bystander to distract her from the mission.
13 gets ordered back home, a crummy Jakarta apartment where she works out, takes identity/trauma-dampening pills, and religiously checks and re-checks a secret payphone that will eventually spit out a new target. While she waits, she happens to notice the drama happening next door, where young Monji (Ali Fikri) is trying and failing to protect his pregnant, drug-addicted, sex worker mother from the nefarious types that populate the desperate corners of the underworld.
When Monji himself disappears into that underworld, 13 launches a one-woman crusade against the dealers, the cops who protect them, and the politicians who protect the cops. Tjahjanto has steadily become a master at quickly and efficiently creating cinematic scumbags you cannot wait to see get their bone-structures rearranged by a protagonist’s fists and feet, and The Shadow Strays never runs out of avatars to embody the various layers of corruption and vice that choke a city and force people into lives of grubby subservience.
“Repentant assassin goes on mission to save an innocent, putting them in conflict with their own employers” is about as old a trope as tropes get. Tjahjanto himself has done it now at least three times, with Headshot, The Night Comes For Us, and now Shadow Strays all playing around with the same basic form.
But within that simple framework, Tjahjanto keeps folding in different ingredients to produce wildly divergent results. Headshot plays like a lost Jackie Chan ‘hapless badass brawls his way through peril’ programmer that runs into the buzzsaw of exploitation cinema. Night Comes For Us takes its elementally simple narrative and then piles on Dead Alive levels of flesh mortification until you have to either laugh at the excess or puke. Or, I don’t know, turn the movie off, I guess.
And now we have The Shadow Strays, which uses our familiarity with the basics of this set-up as an excuse to linger in the margins that other films don’t feel the need to explore. We all know that Umbra and the other shadows will eventually return and there will be hell to pay, but in the meantime Tjahjanto can ruminate on things like the sick camaraderie that exists between his three main villains, a trio of grotesque psychopaths who you desperately want to see die AND three men who love each other like brothers and weep with sincere anguish and grief when one of them gets the cut. And why not follow Umbra on her side-quest and the moral dilemma she faces there that will complicate her reaction to the news that 13 needs to be taken out. And then there’s Jeki, (Kristo Immanuel) a random thug that 13 presses into service who proves to be wildly untrustworthy and also far more complicated than his function within the story would seem to necessitate.
It’d be easy to criticize the length of The Shadow Strays, but when I’m in the hands of a director this confident operating at this level of mastery, I want to sit back and let them cook, trusting that all those disparate pieces are going to fit together and be more than the sum of their parts, however long it takes to comes into focus.
And The Shadow Strays rewards that patience, the novelistic willingness to digress and luxuriate in the details and sprawl working to turn larger-than-life archetypes into flesh and blood people. By the time the film reaches its apocalyptically ruthless final minutes, it starts to feel almost profound. For all its international scope and overstuffed plotting, The Shadow Strays boils down to two women who should love each other, who DO love each other, beating one another to bloody pulp at the behest of powers they’ll never understand for motives they’ll never even know. The powerful give orders, and we have no choice but to comply, and so the world moves deeper into hell.
But The Shadow Strays holds on to the hope that there might be a way out. All of Timo’s apologetic assassin films, in fact, argue that there is a way out of hell. The path may be grueling, but if you have the courage to love and the temerity to persevere in that love despite all the horrors that this world will reap on you, you just might make it through to the other side.
Or, at the very least, earn the privilege of keeping the fight going for another day.
The Shadow Strays is now on Netflix.
