Impetigore 2019

Best friends Maya Tara Basro and Dini Marissa Anita work as tollbooth collectors in Jakarta. On a night shift, Maya is attacked by a man wielding a golok, who claims to be from a village called Harjosari and angrily calls Maya “Rahayu.” Maya narrowly escapes death as the assailant is shot dead by police, leaving her shaken but alive, haunted by the night’s brutality.

Later, Maya reveals an old photograph to Dini—an image handed down by her aunt, who raised her in the city after her parents’ mysterious deaths. The photo shows a young Maya, identified as Rahayu, standing with her deceased parents in front of a grand house. Intrigued by the mystery, Maya and Dini decide to travel to the remote Harjosari village, posing as student researchers, hoping to locate the house and perhaps claim it as inheritance.

The pair reach a long-abandoned residence amid a landscape that feels suspended in time. They are met with cold, suspicious locals and a community submerged in ritual: daily funerals for children and a cemetery crowded with newborns’ headstones. The tension thickens when Dini is lured away by villagers, who brutally slit her throat and flay her, mistaking her for Rahayu. When Maya later glimpses the village chief and the dalang Saptadi at the birth of a skinless baby, she watches in horror as the child is drowned in a ritual of killing.

A compassionate villager named Ratih explains the village’s curse: twenty years earlier, Donowongso, a wealthy dalang, forged a pact with the devil and murdered three girls to “heal” his daughter Rahayu, who was born without skin. Since that grim act, every baby born in Harjosari emerges without skin, a chilling omen that grips the entire community.

A ghostly adviser reveals the path to breaking the curse: Maya must bury the skin of the three slain girls, which Donowongso had turned into wayang kulit puppets. The ghost also discloses that Maya’s birth resulted from an extramarital affair between Shinta Faradina Mufti and Saptadi, and that Saptadi’s dukun mother Misni Christine Hakim cursed him to forget Shinta, while cursing Maya to be skinless. The deeply damaging past explodes into a violent present when Donowongso sacrifices three girls to cure Rahayu, thereby cursing the village even further. In a climactic moment, Saptadi kills Donowongso, Shinta, and a group of wayang musicians during a public performance, and frames Donowongso for the massacre.

Misni arrives and convinces the villagers that the curse can only be undone by flaying Rahayu, a grim ritual the community reluctantly accepts. Maya is evacuated by an aunt who is revealed to be one of Donowongso’s servants, and she is renamed Maya to conceal her true identity. As Ratih and Maya work to bury the puppets made from the skin of the three girls, the oppressive mood begins to lift, and the villagers begin to believe that a new era may dawn.

In a tense confrontation, Misni corners Maya, but Saptadi—already wracked by guilt—slits his own throat, ending his suffering in a sacrificial act. Misni, overwhelmed by grief, takes her own life as well. Ratih proclaims the birth of Harjosari’s first healthy baby in twenty years, a sign that the curse might be broken, and the villagers finally allow Maya to escape with her renewed sense of self.

One year later, a violent miscarriage shocks the village once more. Misni’s ghost returns to extract the fetus and consumes it, signaling that the darkness may not be entirely vanquished and leaving an eerie reminder that some wounds refuse to fully fade.