It is with great excitement and anticipation that fans of action cinema will understand Timo Tjahjanto’s new film, The Shadow Strays, offers some fantastic scenes of limb-breaking, head-crushing, and blood-spewing action. As an artist embodies their craft, Tjahjanto brings forth bloodshed with creativity never seen before as he showcases how demolishing a faceless villain can take place across the screen. Even though The Shadow Strays does not as much feel like a test of endurance in the narrative as Tjahjanto’s previous piece The Night Comes For Us does, there are plenty of action scenes that Timo integrated into his new project, such as the director’s trademark, either.
Yet many are ready to come for another run of mass killings and gun rows who will be satisfied with Timo’s latest work The Shadow Strays, currently streaming on Netflix, when its time for action comes. What is surprising about the new feature film, however, is less the number of violent actions, which seem to be limitless, but the level of concentration displayed to the seemingly uninteresting aspects of filming.
Years ago, Tjahjanto proved his talent at constructing unyielding cinematic roller coasters. However, what is more remarkable about The Shadow Strays is not what they expect from a movie, but rather the fact that this is a film which indeed does stop yes, it stops the roller-coaster rides and instead focuses on overwhelming sadness and loss which does not take away from the martial-arts mayhem but rather adds to that kinetic scale. Strays has gallons of blood to shed and gallons more will survive, yet this film also has a wounded heart that won’t stop pumping, no matter how many times it sustains damage.
The challenge is stated boldly from the very beginning, as Tjahjanto begins his epic with a self-contained short story of twenty minutes imagine that! We are told in text of a covert operation called ‘shadows’. No, this is not the eerie projection feature of a villain in a cartoon but rather a term that refers to a clan of elite mercenaries who will get the job done. Nobody is aware of their clients or the purpose behind their missions but there is one thing in common, the target dies. We are shown in the prologue how one single ‘shadow’ enters and obliterates the occupants of a fortified niche after a bloodbath that would make the gore in Kill Bill look restrained, Barry hides the guards and waits inside. But you’d think that the set-piece has run out with that particular ambush, the operative is forced to take a time out because of the presence of a bystander, and a second ‘shadow’ appears. Wielding a machine gun. That’s the kind of tool used in an intervention by a ninja assassin.
Tjahjanto, as usual, ruins the sense of play by having his main henchman step out to take a call from home, where his young daughter is inquiring as to when her father will return. In the picture’s overall outline, this is not relevant. He acts as a point-of-view character to give us some basic background into the incident and the structure of the premises before the shadows enter to mess the insides with wainings through the cranial cavities. He does not last beyond the twentieth minute of the telecast, and yet Tjahjanto puts on hold the movie and moves to shout that this is a character who has a family, one’s whose life is going to be lost for reasons that they will never comprehend, at the hands of two individuals who are likewise clueless as to why they are doing it. Timo Tjahjanto, even the nigga on the corner does not have a fake involving character in his movies, and this film has a bitter aftertaste of knowing that many people will die with their names cut from their voices.
However, the main plot of the movie is when the stylish expressionism of the ninja outfit is peeled off and we find out that the super-killing sword-wielding psychopath is a teenage girl known simply as 13 (Aurora Ribero who by every measure should be an A-list after this). Her ninja massacre tutor is Umbra, (Hana Malasan) who’s not very happy that 13 let herself feel protective towards an innocent bystander during the mission.
In between this, she gets a call to return back home, an unsavory apartment in Jakarta where she exercises, takes pills designed to suppress her very identity and trauma, and anxiously checks a secret pay phone to which she knows that a new target would eventually be sent. As she does this, she unwittingly witnesses the drama unfolding next door where young Monji (Ali Fikri) is seemingly failing in his attempts to shield his sex worker mother who’s also addicted to drugs and is pregnant, from the dangerous men who lurk in the dreadful underbelly of society.
When Monji himself starts bathing in that low cultural world, 13 embarks on a solitary mission against the dealers, the cops who protect them, and the politicians who protect the cops. It has been Tjahjanto’s skill to provoke a quick bloodlust that makes the audience want to see new cinematic consequences perpetrated by the resolving protagonist, and The Shadow Strays has a never-ending array of avatars, each representing new faces of vice and corruption that are ever-present in expanding cities, ensuring that a large part of the masses has to be as their gormless bottom-end servants. “An assassin with a conscience takes up the task of protecting a helpless one, which earns them the enmity of the people who employed them in the first place” is older than the word cliché. Tjahjanto himself has done this now at least three times, with Headshot and The Night Comes For Us, and now Shadow Strays all doing the same thing differently.
Yet, within that modest framework, Tjahjanto begins to incorporate different elements to yield drastically disparate outcomes. Headshot is a muddled Jackie Chan’s hapless fighter who gets into trouble movie that is dragged into the pit of trash cinema. Night Comes For Us has a remarkably simple premise and then goes for a slaughterhouse tier of bloodshed that even Dead Alive would find overdoing it. Or, I don’t know, just stop watching the movie perhaps.
Then we go to The Shadow Strays, which delves into themes that we already know from other works, allowing the suffocating margins that other filmmakers do not bother to touch. We all know that Umbra, along with the other shadows, will make a comeback, and it will not be pleasant. But in the meantime, Tjahjanto can focus on certain aspects, such as the twisted bond that connects his three central antagonists, three disturbing head-case nutballs that you want to see dead, AND three men who are as close as brothers and literally cry out in pain at the loss of one of them. There is no reason why Umbra shouldn’t go on a side quest, and why Umbra shouldn’t take on the moral complexities that accompany her fanson that 13 has to go. And then there is Jeki, (Kristo Immanuel) a deadbeat goon that 13 recruits who is utterly unreliable and has more sex appeal than should ever be expected from someone with his role in the plot.
It would be fair to say that some attention should be paid to the length of The Shadow Strays yet when I am up against a director as sure of himself as this one is and at this level of skill it is only right that I interface with them. All those pieces which appear to be disjointed and dysfunctional will only get better and begin to make sense over time much as how a jigsaw puzzle operates.
And The Shadow Strays is a rewarding film. The patience, the willingness of novelists to go off on tangents and relish in the minutiae, and the sprawling of the characters so that the archetypes do not remain caricatures, they become characters. By the time the film reaches its barbarically violent penultimate end cut, it almost feels transcendental. It may be said that it all started with women, each of these two women should be in love, and indeed they are, but it also ends with them utterly brutalizing each other under the orders of forces they will and cannot ever comprehend for reasons they will never know. Orders, we obey them and never give a second thought about who gave such an order and that is how we descend further into the abyss.
But a glimmer of hope rests in the fact that there might be a way out of the situation in The Shadow Strays. Indeed all of Timo’s apologetic assassin films hold that hell is not necessarily a forever place. The journey may be painful still one has to possess the courage to love and also the audacity to continue loving despite all the evil that the world seeks to bring upon you and in that case, you might just survive.
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