A woman has a crush on an aspiring novelist and disturbingly tries helping him to complete each of his own characters' tales.

Why It’s Worth Watching

Mouly Surya’s Fiksi presents twisted, sinister vibes both to its story and the central woman character more than what Marlina the Murderer in Four Acts has offered. Thanks to her keen sense of directing and Joko Anwar’s thrilling script, Fiksi manages to gain many surprises and subsequently numerous awards despite the director’s first professional career in the movie directing.

An Apartment That Stores Many Stories to Fiction

Despite the fact Fiksi (Fiction) was produced with a minimum budget, Mouly Surya can achieve a maximum outcome from its absorbing story and characters’ goodish deliverance. Both elements, at least, can cover the limited (or you can say cheap) sets.

Fiksi might share its resemblance to Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window, whereby both movies conjure its story by the depiction of the building’s residents. Although Hitchcock made its set as perfectly as possible, Surya’s sets of the apartment, on the contrary, look kinda shabby. Yet, the choice of its very theme matches the residents’ social hierarchy, mostly from the middle-low class, and can help to build up suspense the story tries to achieve. Fiksi‘s gloomy stories of other residents are not as a result of ones’ deduction, but rather from one’s imagination, and we cannot fathom the validity of their story to the actual tale within the movie (since they’re being said as fiction) even though they fit perfectly in the end.

As the name implies, Fiksi offers interesting “what if…” stories of the apartment residents through Bari’s (Donny Alamsyah) made up stories. As an aspiring novelist, Bari creates his own tale from the lives of his neighborhood, specifically the people that catch his attention as he attempts to twist the rumor or gossip surrounding them. His attachment to the people that share the same building with him is poured into his work. Then a girl named Alisha (Ladya Cheryl) suddenly comes as his next-door neighbor.

Alisha is totally different from Bari who is seemingly messy and broke. She is raised by a rich family and yet, she is caged and controlled by his father we just see once in the beginning, She is surely devastated, throwing all of her anger only on her father’s self-portrait that she hides somewhere inside her room. Sometimes, she calms her nerve by playing a saddening melody with her cello, and when Bari takes a temporary job on her house, the unnoticed Alisha secretly follows him to his own place, then decides to stay there, next to his room.

At a glance, Alisha’s attempt to get near Bari might be interpreted as an act of love (or just boredom she puts to the end as a random man near her age comes to visit), but this is not a romance movie, or it might be at the first quarter of the movie, but the story progresses to a thrilling development of Alisha’s unpredicted nature. After recalling her mother’s saying “everything happens for a reason” before doing the unexpected deed, Alisha conducts her first “task” which results in the closure of Bari’s first fiction.

Cherly’s deliverance of Alisha might seem rigid and it happens (if not) throughout the course of the movie. Cherly who happens to play someone adoring someone lacks the confidence to express so and therefore missed several expressions that explain her other emotional states. On the other hand, she might deliberately perform that to describe Alisha who escapes from her cage, unprepared to face the disparity between the good, the bad, and the trauma of her past.

Quote

“Semua kejadian ada tujuannya.“

“Everything happens for a reason.”

Score

A man and a woman next door find themselves absorbed with the tales made by the man and each tries to end each story with their own version.