Marlina the Murderer in Four Acts

Director: Mouly Surya

2017 / 93min / DCP

If ever there was a film to deliver on what its title promises, it’s Surya’s broodingly beautiful, contemporary-set “satay Western,” in which the title character, a widow played with steely reserve by Marsha Timothy, who’s first encountered living a quiet existence in rural Indonesia with her husband’s mummified corpse for company, discovers a latent talent for violence after being brutalized by a band of home invaders, then takes to the road ahead of pursuers with a severed head in tow. Surya, in her third feature, shows an obvious acquaintance with and affinity for the films of Sam Peckinpah and Sergio Leone, but the meditative approach and outraged feminist sensibility of Marlina the Murderer in Four Acts are entirely her own.

Distributor: Chinese Shadows

Part of Currents of Southeast Asian Cinema