It's often the case that I roll the dice on a streaming option and end up being disappointed. Not too disappointed, mind you, as I have grown used to keeping my expectations low. There's a lot of rubbish out there, easier to find than ever before, but it's all content for websites looking to rotate their film catalogue. sMOTHERed started off in a way that didn't make me think I was going to be impressed by it, but then, in a shock turn of events, I ended up being impressed by it.
Rio Dewanto plays Alif, a man who has been involved in an accident that has wiped out a lot of his memory. He seems happy enough with his wife (Nadine, played by Faradina Mufti) and child, but there's something pushing at him internally, something telling him that things may not be as they seem. That feeling is exacerbated when his mother (Vonny Anggraini) comes to stay. Alif has no memory of his mother. Is he just struggling to recover memories, or is she not who she claims to be?
I'm not familiar with anything else from directors Kevin Rahardjo and Rafki Hidayat (the latter also credited as a co-writer alongside Joko Anwar and Aline Djayasukmana), but this is a good enough feature to have me interested in others that they have helmed. It's impressively tense throughout, and viewers easily get to feel the same sense of things being off-kilter that the main character is feeling.
Dewanto is a solid lead, but gets to do a lot more when things become apparent in the third act that weren't previously known to him. Everyone, whether in the film or watching the film, is waiting for some revelations, but they're still delivered well, and Dewanto reacts in a believably shaken way as he scrambles to reshape his world around the new information available to him. Mufti is also good, playing an understanding wife who views the memory-wiping accident as a bit of a fresh start for the family, and Anggraini plays her part with an enjoyable awkwardness that allows viewers to wonder if there's something wrong with the situation, or perhaps we're just seeing a mother and son who haven't been in the same space for many years.
Impressively dark and disturbing when everything gathers momentum, sMOTHERed is also strangely old-fashioned, in a way, when it comes to presenting the main triggers for the traumatic moments experienced by the main character. Tone it down slightly and you could have something that would easily pair up with something like Psycho or Peeping Tom. It doesn't hold up in direct comparison to those classics, obviously, but it's an interesting exploration of childhood trauma defining someone who then struggles to keep hiding some very big mental scars.
7/10
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