Mokhtar
2022 · 13m · Singapore
Directed by Ridhwan Ismail
Tones: contemplative, tense
Set during the Japanese Occupation of Singapore, a character-centric drama that strands two men from opposing cultures together in an extreme situation and watches their shared humanity surface.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone expects war cinema to explode; Mokhtar does the opposite—two men locked in a room, language barrier, no catharsis, just the unbearable weight of recognizing the other guy's humanity. It's deliberately boring in the best way, which means most people will hate it, which means it's probably essential.
Ismail situates this firmly in the lineage of intimate two-handers (Beckett, Mamet's rhythms) while using Malay-language specificity and the Japanese Occupation as grounding—formally austere, architecturally precise editing that trusts silence the way only trained hands do.
The entire film pivots on the decision to shoot almost entirely in static, frontal close-ups with minimal cutting; it's a constraint that forces the two actors into raw, unmediated presence and transforms a modest premise into something that feels almost unbearably alive.
Reviews
A small character-centric film that attempts to showcase the humanity between two different people of different cultures in extreme situations.