The Devil Wears Pants (Setan Bercelana)
2024 · 24m · Indonesia
Directed by Daffa Mangussara
Genres: horror, mystery, thriller
Tones: dark, tense, theatrical
Dharma, the antagonist in a stage production, is rattled to realize that the actor cast as the corpse on stage is, in fact, truly dead. The boundary between the play and reality collapses around him.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Finally, someone who understands that the real horror isn't the corpse—it's the absolute collapse of meaning the moment fiction admits it's been real all along. Mangussara doesn't blink; he just lets the stage swallow itself, and it's gloriously, infuriatingly weird.
A clever inversion of the theatrical tradition, though the film's reliance on premise over formal architecture means it settles for conceptual novelty where it might have deepened its meditation on performance and death through more considered mise-en-scène.
The decision to play the entire film as theatrical space—flat lighting, diegetic sound, no escape routes for the camera—is what makes this work; it forces the actor playing Dharma to do all the psychological work with his face and stillness, and that constraint becomes the film's secret weapon.
Reviews
Shortlisted for the CinemaSHORT Asian Short Film Competition 2025 — an Indonesian horror/mystery/thriller running 23 minutes that follows Dharma, the antagonist of a theater play, who realizes the actor playing the corpse is truly dead.
Festivals
- CinemaSHORT Asian Short Film Competition 2025