Fiction.

Alisha is the daughter of a wealthy family, grew up without her mother and lives with her father in a large house. She is fixated on Bari, the gardener's son. She follows him to a run down apartment complex, moves in, and starts watching the people who live there. Then she starts writing a novel about them, and intervening so that what she writes comes true. Mouly Surya directs, in her first feature. The idea is the boundary between authorship and control. Alisha is writing fiction and entering lives in order to realise it; as the novel advances, events move where she wants them. The narrative treats this as a thriller, and the writer becomes the threat. The production was unusual for Indonesia. In 2008 the industry was producing mainly horror and romantic comedy; this arrived as a psychological thriller and was named best film at the Indonesian Film Festival. The apartment complex is the real location: narrow corridors, a shared courtyard, obligatory neighbourliness and no privacy generate all the tension in it. Mouly Surya later became internationally known with Marlina the Murderer in Four Acts, and this first film is where that cinema starts. Who it is for: viewers who like Southeast Asian independent film and psychological thrillers. Who it is not for: the pace is slow, most of the characters are written cold, and the violence arrives abruptly at the end.