The Hole, 309 Days to the Bloodiest Tragedy (Bolong, 309 hari sebelum tragedi berdarah) had its world première at IFFR 2026, 3 Feb
“So you like my hole, huh?”, asks a pretty young woman (Anya Zen) near the beginning of Hanung Bramantyo’s The Hole, 309 Days to the Bloodiest Tragedy (Bolong, 309 hari sebelum tragedi berdarah). In other contexts, this line might be a pornographic come-on, but here, the speaker has an actual hole in her back through which her spinal column is visible – the kind of mortal injury from which there can be no (non-supernatural) survival. And she has herself inflicted another grave wound on someone else – for she is triumphantly holding up the severed penis of her addressee, the village security head Sipri (Royhnan Hidayat), who is clutching his bloody groin as he dies in agony before her. At the same time, in another part of town, the policeman Suripno (Dinmas Herjuno) has just been murdered in his own bed, with a huge hole, similar to the woman’s, cut into his back.
It is 1964, and the administrative village of Lubang Buaya – literally “crocodile’s pit” – on the outskirts of Indonesia’s capital Jakarta has become a crime scene. For on the 30th of every month, local officials have been mysteriously murdered, with a hole left in each man’s back, and with, Se7en-like, a word denoting his sin carved into his flesh. The villagers suggest that a ‘Hollow Ghost’ is responsible for all these death, but soldier Sugeng (Baskara Mahendra), sent from Jakarta to investigate in the village where he was raised by his adoptive father Sukarya (Mathias Muchis), rejects such superstitions, insisting that the murders are “the work of a person like me.” Meanwhile his new, Western-educated wife Arum Wangi (Carissa Perusset), in Jakarta looking after their now ailing father, keeps coming under attack from an preternatural female presence.
When a film is described as ‘full of holes’, it is usually a far from complimentary way of pointing out its narrative incoherence. Yet right from its title, The Hole 309 Days to the Bloodiest Tragedy is literally full of them: not just the signature gaping wounds left in all the victims’ backs, but the pit into which we see a still living woman’s body unceremoniously dumped at the very beginning of the film, and the old well into which, as opening text tells us, the bodies of seven abducted army generals would be thrown on 30 September 1965. This last bloody national tragedy, towards which the film’s title and opening text tell us that events are heading, was an all-too-real coup attempt that took place in Lubang Buaya, even if there are many holes in the military’s official version of events, which led to mass killings of communists. Even as The Hole circles around this crux in Indonesian history, during a time when President Sukarno’s efforts to unify the nationalists, Islamists, Communists and the military under his policy of Guided Democracy were collapsing, and Major General Suharto was beginning his ruthless rise to the Presidency, it is stated in the prologue that “the story and events in this film are fictional”. In this way writer/director Bramantyo gets to have it both ways, telling a tale shaped with palatable genre gestures (serial-killing thriller, ghost story, rape revenge) while also allegorising the unravelling of the national order in the Sixties.
Here Lubang Buaya is a microcosm of Indonesia. All the town’s dignitaries – whether the police, the religious leaders or the privileged landowning class – are shown to be deeply corrupt and abusive beneath their veneer of respectability. And so, while Bramantyo does not take a line on who was behind the 30 September tragedy beyond suggesting that there was a devil at work, he does expose the hidden rot in every pillar of society, and also dramatises the ease with which communists could be scapegoated for broader ills.
Meanwhile Sugeng finds the very foundations of his family rocked, even as his own fate becomes intertwined with that of a local puppeteer-turned-shaman named Suradji (Iskaka Khiva) who, like Sugeng himself, is an essentially good man breaking bad – with a vengeance. This small-town haunting will have national consequences, cursing the whole country for decades to come. So while The Hole, 309 Days to the Bloodiest Tragedy is a great murder mystery and supernatural chiller with an inexorable queen of black magic at its heart, it is also a political parable, in which Indonesia faces an unholy reckoning for even its most parochial sins. After all, it takes a village, and here it is the wrongs at every echelon of this community that allow evil and chaos to emerge from the hole.
strap: Hanung Bramantyo’s period horror tells a tale of parochial sin, black magic and ghostly revenge near the end of Sukarno’s Presidency
© Anton Bitel
