"How to Fight Back": Director Turns Indonesian Thriller on Suharto's Fear

Danial Rifki finished his Indonesian remake of the thriller The Invisible Guest in 2023, and now that it has reached a festival screen he says it is about fear of authority and "how to fight back." ^[1]

The film is a Falcon Pictures remake of Oriol Paulo's 2016 Spanish thriller Contratiempo, known in English as The Invisible Guest, moved to an Indonesian setting, according to Variety. ^[1] It screened in person at Jakarta World Cinema, in the festival's Official Selection: Fantastic section, which lists Rifki as director, a running time of two hours and a cast led by Reza Rahadian, Mawar Eva De Jongh, Arifin Putra and Putri Ayudya. ^[2]

Variety published its interview with Rifki on November 7, 2026. In it he gave a political reading of a story that, on the page, is a puzzle. ^[1]

A clock, a lawyer and a locked room

The festival synopsis gives the frame. A young businessman is accused of murdering his lover. He hires a lawyer, who has three hours to find out what happened. ^[2]

It is a tidy machine, the kind of high-concept thriller that travels well because it needs little more than two people, a table and a deadline. Rifki, according to Variety, tied that confined, interrogation-style setting to something larger: what he called Indonesia's political trauma. ^[1]

A story about a person pinned in a room by someone with power over them is easy to read as a national memory. Rifki makes that reading himself.

Fear under the New Order

Rifki told Variety that Indonesia carries trauma from the New Order, the period of Suharto's rule, which he described as lasting around 32 years. People then, he said, could not criticize the government. ^[1]

Fear of people with power who oppress ordinary people is central to the film, he said. That is why he describes it as being about "how to fight back." ^[1]

He did not leave the argument in the past. Rifki said the film grew out of his concern about abuse of power in Indonesia today.

In the Reformation Era, the period that followed Suharto, he said suppression might be happening "underground." He alleged that social-media criticism of the government can be shadowbanned, meaning quietly hidden from other users' feeds. ^[1]

Those are his claims. The interview does not document a case, and no independent finding about the government's conduct is offered. They are best read as how a working director sees his country, not as established fact.

What he offered as the answer is modest and distinctly of this decade. Social-media users, Rifki said, can help one another, and people power in the digital era can regain influence. ^[1]

A film that waited

The film's own history has a small irony in it. A story about resisting the powerful sat finished for a long time because of a contract.

Rifki said the film was completed in 2023 and that exclusivity clauses with HBO held up its release. He said the matter had only recently been resolved. ^[1] Variety reported that the film debuted on HBO Max on August 7, 2026. ^[1]

The terms of those clauses, and how long they ran, have not been made public. Neither the festival listing nor the interview gives a screening date or reports how the audience responded. ^{[1] [2]}

Streaming exclusivity is a common hold on a film. It tends to leave the people who made it waiting while the work sits unseen. Here the wait ended with a festival slot in the capital, where the film could finally be watched by an audience in a room, which suits a story built around rooms.

Why a remake can carry a local argument

Remakes are often treated as the safe option, a proven plot in a new language. The Indonesian version suggests otherwise. The plot stays the same and the fear changes.

Whether or not a viewer in Jakarta shares Rifki's politics, the story he describes gives a foreign mystery a local weight.

This fits how he describes his work more broadly. Rifki said human moral conflict is the backbone of what he makes across genres. ^[1] A thriller is a good vehicle for that. Everyone in the room is under pressure, and each has a reason to say less than they know.

There is also the question of what a country keeps. Rifki speaks of a trauma that outlasted the regime that caused it. A film can hold that kind of memory in a form that is easier to carry than a history lesson, and it can ask the audience what they would do in the chair across the table.

What comes next

Rifki's next film, Before Thirty, is set for release in January 2027. He described it as a survival drama and a commentary on the pressure to achieve success before turning 30. ^[1] It is a different subject, but the interview suggests the same interest: people squeezed by forces larger than themselves, and what they do about it.