There’s something about a hole in the ground that invites mystery. Who put it there and why, where does it lead, and should we be worried about people falling in or what might crawl out of there that someone or something might have wished stayed buried. Hanung Bramantyo’s The Hole (Bolong, 309 Hari Sebelum Tragedi Berdarah) digs back to the Indonesia of the mid-1960s in which one kind of authoritarian rule is dying while the new had not yet been born. His hero finds himself torn between conflicting loyalties while straddling class boundaries as he searches for a potentially inconvenient truth behind the murders of several local officials.
The opening title cards tell us that this story takes place before a “national tragedy” in which seven army officers were murdered and their bodies thrown into a well during the 30 September Movement’s failed coup attempt. The killings are blamed both on “the communists” and perhaps on the army engaging in some questionable manoeuvres of its own. Sugeng (Baskara Mahendra) is charged with finding out the truth in order to rehabilitate the army’s image. He’s also made aware, however, that the village lies in a convenient spot for anyone who might be looking to launch a coup against Sukarno, which presumably includes Suharto.
But what he quickly finds is that each of the dead men arguably deserved it and that the list of people who might have wanted them gone is quite long even before you start adding in ghosts. Each of them is someone with legitimate political power that they have enthusiastically misused. The village head Sumanto said he’d fix local infrastructure but embezzled the money for himself while bribing the police chief to turn a blind eye. The village secretary scammed the local farmers and trapped them in debt. Dependent on these authority figures, the locals were powerless to oppose them and those who attempted to speak out were quickly silenced.
Some attribute these killings to the communists for that reason in that taking out corrupt officials is in line with their ideology, though it could just as likely be a person or group of people fed up with living under this system as Sukarno’s “guided democracy” began to fall apart due to its increasing dependence on China and Russia which further inflamed the nationalists and military. Sukarno had indeed based his system of government on a traditional village, but this one is rotten to the core as the corrupt officials all protect each other. Others argue that the killings are the revenge of a “hollow ghost,” and even if some are as dismissive of the supernatural as educated policeman Sugeneng, the term could perhaps stand in for many who have been hollowed out by governmental betrayal and pushed beyond breaking point.
Sugeng may not believe in ghosts, but he stands in an awkward position. He was a adopted as a child by a wealthy man from just that village who is now on his deathbed. Sugeng’s adoptive father badgers him into marrying his adopted sister, Arum (Carissa Perusset), though he feels uncomfortable with it and even if assured by his imam that there’s nothing untoward about the arrangement still thinks of Arum as a sister. It’s tempting then to think that his present predicament is caused by the breaking of a taboo, or that, as an adopted son, he’s inherited a dark legacy stemming from his father’s wealth and privilege while doing his best to forget his roots and inhabit this new upper-class world. Back in the village, one of the guards on duty at the time of the murder pranked a friend with a black magic book made to look like the Quran, and perhaps it’s not so far-fetched to consider that dark sorcery is a possible cause for the strange events.
Sugeng, however, has no idea what he’s up against. He can’t see the political context nor his family’s fading fortunes nor is he really prepared for the truth behind the murders. It doesn’t quite occur to him that there might be a dark truth within his own household and callously ignores his new’s complaints about being chased by ghosts, focussing on his case and rarely coming home as she tries to care for her dying father alone. The holes here are the one’s in Sugeng’s, and the nation’s, buried histories, but it’s all still there and waiting to be unearthed. “The nation is not in a good state,” Sugeng’s imam friend warns him, and it seems that you can’t really blame anyone for turning to one dark side or another when things are as bad and confusing as they currently seem to be.
Trailer (English subtitles)
Windows on Worlds 