‘Red Before Dawn’ review: Garin Nugroho’s stirring period piece explores the development of post-independence Indonesia

Dir: Garin Nugroho. Indonesia. 2026. 113mins

At one point early on in director Garin Nugroho’s Red Before Dawn, one military officer tells another that “war has always been about resources” – bringing the Indonesian filmmaker’s latest meditation on history, power and colonialism right up to the present moment. Based on true stories about the unspoken and under-the-radar civilian contributors to the often-bloody development of post-independence Indonesia, Nugroho’s latest is frequently on the nose but there’s little to argue the subject matter is anything less than vital – and, sadly, still current.

Comments on cycles of violence, and asks what comes after independence

Nugroho has been among Indonesia’s most prominent cinema voices since he emerged internationally in 1991 with Love In A Slice Of Bread, further cementing his position as the country’s unofficial poet laureate with Opera Jawa (2006) and Memories Of My Body (2018). Premiering in Tokyo competition, Red Before Dawn is formally challenging, wilfully theatrical and typically Nugroho in its construction, but it also turns an enlightening lens on an underrepresented stretch of Indonesian history and will likely travel to further festivals. 

It is, however, a film that sits in direct opposition to the more commercial fare coming out of Indonesia in recent years, largely horrors like Wregas Bhanuteja’s Levitating, Edwin’s Sleep No More and Yosep Anggi Noen’s The Redemption Of Sin. Nugroho’s signature mix of archival material, folk motifs, interstitial animation and heightened drama will make the film a tougher sell for theatrical release, even at home in Indonesia, but niche distributors are likely to take an interest given the director’s prestige status and the film’s resonance.

Red Dawn opens on what could easily be an elaborate stage, with an unnamed solider decrying the state of the nation to which he gave his blood and sweat. Unidentified prisoners are held in cages, freed only to be executed by the soldier. It’s the last we see of the man – although mining engineer Frans (producer-star Nicholas Saputra) will encounter similar individuals on a road trip from Sumatra to Yogyakarta in 1946, the start of three turbulent years following the end of the Second World War and the dawn of Indonesian independence from the Netherlands. Frans uncomfortably straddles two worlds as a mixed race Dutch-Indonesian geologist, not entirely trusted by either the so-called liberating Allies (Dutch and British) nor local freedom fighters.

Nonetheless, the nascent republican government charges Frans with delivering a cache of critical survey documents – ones it’s believed will give the new state economic leverage – to the provisional capital. Forced to take slower backroads thanks to the escalating chaos, he and his driver Qasim (Malaysian actor Bront Palarae, Ghost In The Cell), an Indian solider from a British detachment, pick up extra passengers along the way: sensitive blind radio operator Arya (Nagra Pakusadewo); Chinese nurse Fifi (Laura Basuki, 24 Hours With Gaspar); and Badriah (Tissa Biani) a budding singer with a traumatic wartime life. The group crosses paths with regional warlords, anti-Dutch and anti-Chinese villages, disaffected and disillusioned farmers, Western loyalists and the various conflicting stakeholders in the new Indonesia at the time.

Constructed in a series of loosely connected vignettes – which would be charming misadventures in a film of less gravitas – Red Before Dawn largely dispenses with metaphor and symbolism. Nugroho and co-writer Dirmawan Hatta instead opt for unvarnished dialogue and explicit (though not graphic) moments of brutality that comments on cycles of violence, and asks what comes after independence, if liberation is truly liberating, and who makes the rules.

Shot in a dominant military brown palette by cinematographer Larry Manda (a regular collaborator with Lav Diaz) and set to a pounding, imposing score, the film’s sometime soapy melodrama and moments of grace make the political factionalism all the more heartbreaking and/or frustrating – and resonant. In putting the focus on ordinary civilians rather than the figures and events documented more thoroughly in history books (the Bandung Sea of Fire, a young revolutionary Sukarno), Red Before Dawn is frequently eye-opening in its simplicity, buried beneath unconventionality though it may be.