The Devil Wears Pants
2025 · 24m · Indonesia
Directed by Daffa Mangussara
Genres: horror, mystery, thriller
Tones: dark, tense, theatrical
Dharma, the antagonist in a theater play (originally titled "Setan Bercelana"), is shocked mid-performance to realize that the actor lying on stage as the corpse is actually dead. The discovery unspools the line between the staged murder and a real one.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
This is the kind of premise that makes everyone else nervous—a play-within-a-film where the murder staging goes genuinely wrong, and Mangussara doesn't blink, just lets the collapse happen. Most scouts would call it gimmicky; it's actually fearless.
The theatrical grammar here is precise: Mangussara understands how to weaponize the fourth wall, using the play's existing visual and tonal language to make the real death feel like a continuation rather than a rupture, which places it squarely in a lineage of meta-horror that respects its own rules.
The decision to keep the camera on Dharma's face as she realizes the corpse is actually dead—holding the performance even as it fractures—is the hinge the whole film turns on; everything before and after collapses into that single moment of unbearable recognition.
Festivals
- CinemaSHORT Asian Short Film Competition 2025