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Indonesian Director Danial Rifki Remakes Spanish Thriller The Invisible Guest
ReIndonesian Director Danial Rifki Remakes Spanish Thriller The Invisible Guest
Danial Rifki discusses his Indonesian remake of Oriol Paulo's Spanish thriller The Invisible Guest, which premiered at the Jakarta World Cinema festival and draws on Suharto-era fear.
Indonesian filmmaker Danial Rifki has made a new version of The Invisible Guest, the Spanish thriller that Oriol Paulo released in 2016. The remake, which Rifki says was completed in 2023, has now premiered at the Jakarta World Cinema festival, where it is one of three of his films on the program.
Rifki has said the project is less about the mechanics of a mystery than about the atmosphere of fear that shaped his country's past. He points to the Suharto era as a formative backdrop and frames the film around the question of how people resist oppression. In his telling, the thriller form gives him a way to explore that pressure while keeping audiences engaged.
The release of the film was held up for some time by exclusivity clauses tied to HBO, which delayed its path to audiences after it was finished. The film is produced by Falcon Pictures. Its festival premiere marks the first public showing of the picture in its completed form.
Rifki's interview with Variety places the remake within a wider interest in adapting international genre films for local audiences. By reworking a story from Spain into an Indonesian setting, he has tied a familiar whodunit structure to the history and social anxieties of his own country. The director's comments suggest that the remake is meant to be more than a faithful copy of the original, using the framework of suspense to address questions of power, memory and resistance.
The Jakarta World Cinema festival premiere gives the film a platform in its home market, where Rifki's work is being showcased alongside two other titles. The festival showing comes after a period in which the picture was complete but unseen, and it sets up the next stage of its distribution.
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