The travails of a colourblind electrician and sharp-eyed diamond appraiser take the series to its dramatic conclusion.

As Joko Anwar’s portmanteau series, Nightmares and Daydreams, draws towards its climax, I have found my expectations and frustrations increasing in equal measure.

On the plus side, each distinct tale is taking me to corners of Indonesian society and history I knew nothing about, exploring them through intriguing high concept horror weirdery. On the down side, each episode has, in its closing act, disappeared up a narrative drainpipe on the promise of a reveal in the season finale which will make sense of everything.

Unfortunately, in the penultimate instalment, Hypnotized, the whole thing is pretty much swallowed by that series arc drainpipe. It starts promisingly. Ali (Fachri Albar) is struggling to get work. He’s a whiz with a soldering iron, but no firms will hire him because of his colourblindness. Desperate for money, he exploits the hypnosis skills taught to him by a neighbour, only to find his broken televisions hypnotizing him in return and turning his life into a seemingly inescapable nightmare. It’s a terrific set-up, but the trouble with nightmares is they have no narrative rules, so fifteen minutes in, we have no idea what’s real and what isn’t – and after a few more minutes of that, I, for one, had ceased to care. Most frustratingly of all, none of the questions posed by those opening scenes had any relevance to the eventual outcome which was, again, all about the mysterious series arc.

So, as I clicked ‘Next Episode’ for the season finale, P.O. Box 888, was it all going to be worth it?

Weeeeeellll… yes and no.

Valdya (Asmara Abigail) is a diamond appraiser working for the Indonesian Customs Authority, respected for her razor sharp vision (in contrast to Ali’s colourblindness). A few years previously, her sister has disappeared after applying to a mysterious P.O. Box in response to a job advert in the Jakarta News. After discovering a secret pen drive behind a photograph, Valdya embarks on a quest to find out what really happened to her sibling which, we will discover (via an extremely funny scene in a crowded elevator) is the gruesome key to the series arc that has supposedly been holding the whole show together.

And…?

Hmmm… Yeah… I guess the great reveal is vaguely interesting, but even if the future of humankind is at stake, if you only tell us in the series’s closing fifteen minutes, there’s hardly time to get excited before either a) it’s all over or b) we have a second season for which the seven part series we’ve just watched was just one long tease.

As a matter of personal preference, I could have done without the series arc altogether and just had Joko Anwar tell us some fascinating and illuminating fables of Indonesian life. The writing, acting and production values are easily good enough to have me coming back for more every week.

Verdict: Having said that, the not-particularly-interesting-end-of-the-world aside, Nightmares and Daydreams is an intriguing oddity well worth a looksee for any curious horror connoisseur. 

Episode 6 – 5/10  Episode 7 – 7/10  Overall series score – 8/10

Martin Jameson

www.ninjamarmoset.com