Jarot (Aksara Dena) spends the entire day sifting through sand and gravel. Whispers circulate that this quarry, owned by Raden Broto (Uhani Darmawan), is cursed, and all workers have been ordered to leave before nightfall. However, when Jarot discovers a diamond, he begins to hope for more and, along with Bogel (Alex Suhendra), embarks on a search – until a pair of red eyes suddenly appear from the bushes.

After her husband fails to return home, a worried Ambar (Raikhaanun) decides to visit the quarry the next day with her son Bondan (Nabil Altaf). With no one offering clear explanations, she asks Broto to let her work, hoping to make a living. As the truth about Jarot’s demise surfaces, it becomes apparent that the quarry is not just a place rumoured to be haunted by spirits.

At first glance, the premise unfolds like a classic ghost story: a mysterious disappearance, an allegedly haunted worksite, and whispered rumours of something monstrous lurking in the dark. But Junjung cleverly sidesteps horror clichés, grounding his film in the reality of labourers whose search for a better life is entangled with exploitation, superstition, and silence. As the camera lingers on piles of sand and gravel sifted endlessly by hand, the quarry itself becomes a metaphor. One that buries not only bodies, but also truth and conscience.

What distinguishes this film from your average horror is its moral ambiguity. There are no true villains here, only people driven to desperate choices. When Jarot stumbles upon a diamond, his decision to return to the site at night, despite clear warnings, is not fuelled by evil but by hope. A dangerous hope that whispers: “maybe this is your chance!”. His friend Bogel, increasingly unhinged by greed and paranoia, becomes the vessel for the story’s descent into madness. His twitchy energy and gem-fixated mania evoke a character somewhere between tragic addict and folkloric creature. Actor Alex Suhendra walks this line masterfully, making Bogel both pitiful and unnerving.

The real centre of gravity, however, is Ambar – Jarot’s wife – whose calm determination contrasts sharply with the chaos around her. Played with grace and resolve by Raihaanun, Ambar steps into a masculine world of violence, silence, and hierarchy, not to fight it, but in order to survive and ultimately dismantle it. In a film where nearly every man is driven by hunger – for wealth, for power, for escape – Ambar’s resistance to these impulses makes her the unexpected hero. She is not fearless, but she refuses to be consumed.

Visually, the film embraces restraint. The gray-brownish colour palette, drained of contrast and light, reflects the emotional and spiritual barrenness of the setting. Junjung’s direction is precise and deliberate, using stillness and silence in order to stretch tension until it nearly snaps. The eventual burst of violence is cathartic but not triumphan. It feels more like a natural consequence than a climax, as though the land itself has lost patience.

Beneath the personal tragedy lies a wider, more unsettling commentary. Junjung’s choice of setting – a sand quarry – evokes real-world anxieties in Indonesia, where environmental exploitation has become inextricably linked to economic desperation. The 2023 revocation of the country’s ban on marine sand exports looms like a spectre over the film, suggesting that even policy decisions ripple into personal horror. The eroding coastlines and vanishing islands outside the screen echo the spiritual erosion we witness within it.

Mad of Madness doesn’t offer easy answers or traditional resolutions. Its haunting power lies in what it withholds. Evil is never named, and the supernatural remains largely off-screen. But what emerges is far more disturbing than any monster: a sense that systems of greed, once set in motion, will always demand sacrifice. In this world, beauty has a cost, and those who cannot – or will not – pay it are simply swept away.

The film plays like a spectral fusion of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s meditative mysticism, Lav Diaz’s socio-political gravitas, and Brillante Mendoza’s raw realism – where silence is as loaded as violence, and landscape becomes a haracter.

Rather than relying on spectacle, Junjung crafts a slow-burn tale of quiet dread and social decay, evoking horror not through jump scares but through the creeping realisation that the true evil lies not in the shadows, but instead inside the human heart. Mad of Madness isn’t just a horror film – it’s a reckoning. Slow, meditative, and thematically rich.

Mad of Madness showed at the Udine Far East Film Festival (Feff).