‘Nightmares and Daydreams’ Fuses Jakarta’s Social Ills with the Supernatural

Indonesia is an enchanted culture full of folklore involving ghosts, demons, and djinns (shape-shifting spirits from Arabian and Muslim mythology).

These stories usually involve a moral of some kind: Do not leave a house unattended, for this invites the dwelling of demons. Always respect the elderly, lest they return to haunt you. Settle squabbles within your family, or their spirit will fail to transition to the afterlife due to unresolved conflicts on earth. Always come home before nightfall, because sunset signals the thinning of the barrier between the spiritual and the physical realms.

It is no wonder that on any given week, horror movies dominate the Indonesian box office. A powerhouse of the genre, director Joko Anwar (The Forbidden Door, Satan’s Slaves, and Impetigore) recently gave the rest of the world another taste of elevated Indonesian horror with Netflix’s Nightmares and Daydreams.

The seven-episode series offers an authentic look at how stories of the supernatural are woven into Indonesian culture and function as acute social commentary. Western audiences might be tempted to interpret Nightmares and Daydreams in a demythologized fashion—as if the supernatural elements of the series merely serve to draw audiences to consider the perennial social problems that plague Indonesia, or more specifically, Jakarta. Yet the supernatural and social issues actually coalesce in a way that echoes reality.

In particular, Nightmares and Daydreams reminds us of a pre-Christian culture, in which desperate characters turn not to God or the church for understanding or deliverance but resort to the occult or supernatural for relief, with devastating consequences.

A running theme of the series—in which each episode is its own short story in a loosely connected universe—is that desperate situations lead to desperate decisions. These decisions could be a moral compromise to cut corners, which leads the supernatural to punish the character, or an invocation of the supernatural in hope for deliverance.

For instance, “Old House” depicts a taxi driver named Panji with a dilemma: Should he continue to care for his cognitively declining mother or send her to a retirement home with a price tag that seems too good to be true? It’s a question heavy on the minds of many in Indonesia, as the country lacks a stable social security plan for pensions or affordable retirement homes. Aging parents expect to be taken care of by their adult children.

It is not unusual in Jakarta for three or four generations to live together in one home or in the same neighborhood. The cultural assumption is that when children are married, they are not sent off to form a nuclear family of their own but are rather enlarging the existing families. There is less emphasis on the notion of boundaries between married and unmarried adult children: All remain under the authority of the most elderly family member, and everyone has obligations to take care of the elderly.

So when a sense of desperation drives Panji to move his mother to the retirement home, it’s not a surprise that he faces punishment for neglecting his traditional role and caving in to his sense of despair. The retirement home turns out to be run by a monstrous cult that seeks to exploit them.

Many episodes center around characters living in dire poverty. In “The Orphan,” a grieving couple sets their hopes on a magical orphan boy, rumored to have the ability to bring about great wealth to those who take care of him and death to those who abuse him. “Encounter” focuses on a fisherman named Wahyu (Indonesian for “revelation”) and a village facing eviction. After Wahyu snaps a photograph of an angel, villagers hope to avoid forceful expulsion by leveraging the rare item. Both episodes highlight the gross inequality between Jakarta’s powerful rich and oppressed poor and the ways that the poor are vulnerable to further exploitation.

In “Poems and Pains,” Rania, an author who is struggling to move beyond her successful novel on abuse, is herself supernaturally in contact with a woman facing severe domestic abuse. The episode reminds audiences that abusers in Indonesia rarely face consequences due to the lack of legal pathways available for victims, and yet Indonesians are enthralled by such scandals as a form of entertainment.

Other episodes tackle the important role fathers play, exploring what happens when a father is absent as well as how a father’s choices can impact his family. “Hypnotized,” for instance, sees a desperate father resort to theft by hypnosis (an increasingly common phenomenon in Indonesia) to provide for his family, only to find that his family has followed in his footsteps, with tragic results. The responsibilities one has toward the family looms large in the conscience of this show.

The spirit-filled world of Nightmares and Daydreams reminds Christians of the unique hope we have in Christ amid broken systems and desperate situations, and of the redemptive influence of the Christian faith within the context of the ancient world.

Like Indonesian culture, the Greco-Roman world in which the early Christians lived was polytheistic—full of magical rites, pilgrimages, and idols. Christians were viewed as disrupters of religion because they rejected those practices and believed Jesus Christ was the climactic revelation of the one Creator God. He had addressed our ultimate problem of sin and defeated the powers, putting them to shame on the cross. Christianity was thus a demystifying, anti-superstitious religion.

Instead of seeing a myriad of spirits and powers behind each event or location, the Triune God is now seen as the agent of providence, who works through secondary causes, and cannot be manipulated by human decisions.

Instead of invoking the aid of the gods or spirits for one’s own ends, Jesus calls his disciples to emulate the God who did not count divinity a thing to be exploited but who humbled himself, taking the form of a servant (Phil. 2:6–7). He calls us to participate in the divine work of caring for “the least of these” (Matt. 25:40), considering the poor and marginalized blessed (Matt. 5:3–11), and taking care of the widow, the orphans, and those who cannot care for themselves (James 1:27). The church, therefore, should be an agent of mercy in times of great desperation.

The horror genre is a reminder that we are not in control, that we are vulnerable, and that we live in the “present evil age” (Gal. 1:4). Asian horror, in particular, often reveals a spiritual porousness that resists the secularization of the modern West, and Nightmares and Daydreams is no exception. It reminds us that the world is not yet fully leavened by the anti-superstitious influences of the Christian faith and that the church should be a salve, so that those in desperate situations need not turn to the demonic to find relief.

The show also displays in acute ways how Indonesian culture—which prioritizes family, traditional gender roles, and openness to the spiritual—continues to be plagued by sinful and broken conditions. Such cultures need the biblical witness just as much as secular contexts that prioritize autonomy, careerism, and resistance to any notion of enchantment.

Like many anthologies, the entries in Nightmares and Daydreams vary in quality. “Poems and Pains,” “The Old House,” and “P.O. Box” (which was directed by Anwar himself), stand out as the best. The acting can occasionally be overly theatrical or stilted, the special effects limited and at times sketchy, and the exposition too obvious. Some of the episodes could be trimmed into 30-minute vignettes instead of hour-long dramas (especially “Encounter” and “Hypnotized”). It’s also not for everyone, as the series contains disturbing themes involving violence, monsters, spirits, cults, and abuse.

Yet, for Christians, it reminds us that the cure for social ills is not to move from secularism to spiritualism, from autonomy to family values, from liberalism to conservatism (or vice versa). Instead, it’s to become more captivated by the unique hope we have in Christ, who calls us to be agents of mercy and reconciliation to a world that desperately needs it.