24 Hours with Gaspar (now available on Netflix) is director Yosep Anggi Noen’s stylish adaptation of Sabda Armandio’s dystopian novel about a tough Indonesian detective trying to tie up a big, long, long, dangling loose end before his heart breaks down in 24 hours. . It’s not the most uplifting story, but Noen shows an eye for beauty in bleakness (and more than a few Tarantinoisms) in this uneven, but worthy, neo-future crime drama.
24 HOURS WITH GASPAR: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The essence: —My name is Gaspar. “My heart is on the right side.” This is a kind of Gaspar (Reza Rahadian) mantra: he repeats it in a black voiceover several times throughout the film, reminding us of the central truth of his character. , that is, that his heart is literally on the right side of his body, a condition that is shortening his life, and that his heart, metaphorically, is in the right place and is better than bad. And by shortening his life, I mean he has about 24 hours to live before it, I don’t know, stops working or explodes or whatever it’s going to do to kill him. And then BAM, we see large numbers of blocks on the screen, counting down their last hours, minutes and seconds. The question is, what is he going to do on his last day on this mortal plane?
The answer is to seek closure. Solve things. Specifically, what happened to the only true friend she ever had. We see Kirana (Shofia Shireen) in flashbacks with young Gaspar (Ali Fikry), and they are all smiles and joy until one fateful day when he went fishing and returned home, she was gone and he never saw her again. see. Since then, the world seems to have gone to hell, or at least begun its descent: urban decay, dire news (one refers to the “36th plague” that occurred in 2025), an apparent decline in population and beauty steep slope of overgrown areas. the forests begin to take over once again. Gaspar sees the worst of humanity working as a detective and has just discovered mass graves that appear to be part of a trafficking operation. And now that he is dying, he wants to know what happened to Kirana. Time flies.
Well, actually, “what happened” was probably terrible, so Gaspar focuses on a quest for revenge with nothing to lose. He sees Wan Ali (Iswadi Pratama) as a guy who knows things and is probably responsible for them. He owns a jewelry store and is a bastard in the boots of humanity, giving off a disgusting “I’ve killed a man before” vibe. Gaspar realizes that he cannot face Wan Ali alone, so he takes turns remembering the happy happy days of his youth and working on his current greasy and dirty task, which is to gather people to to help him. There’s his compadre Agnes (Shenina Cinnamon), who runs an underground fight club; Kik (Laura Basuki), his and Kirana’s childhood friend, and his SO Njet (Kristo Immanuel); and Wan Ali’s disgruntled employee Yadi (Sal Priadi) and his recently widowed mother Tati (Dewi Arawan), who is either amusingly confusing comic relief or a slightly callous representation of senility. Does this lead to some kind of happy ending? No spoilers, but hey, probably not.
What movies will it remind you of?: Tarantino never made a dystopian thriller (thank goodness!), but the pulpy vibes and Ennio Morricone-derived pop-mashup music are largely derived from the pulp fiction the filmmaker’s work. Visually, it is Bounty hunteresque sometimes, or more accurately, reminiscent of the Bounty hunter-Duncan Jones twice removed aesthetic. Mute either Source code.
Performance worth seeing: Cinnamon is the most charismatic among the supporting cast and asks to be more of a well-rounded character than just a plot device (opportunities for this are ignored). That leaves Rahadian to carry most of gasparand his performance is more dutiful than moving, but the fact that we care at all about what happens is a testament to his performance.
Memorable dialogue: Yadi sums up Gaspar with a pithy observation: “He seems more like a thief than someone who would commit to marriage.”
Sex and skin: None.
Our opinion: 24 Hours with Gaspar It starts promisingly and ends poignantly, but struggles during a long middle act that suffers from pacing issues and a lack of memorable moments. At first, Noen appears to be establishing a Wick-Action-packed mystery, with a couple of elegantly filmed and carefully choreographed fight sequences. Once Gaspar is loaded up and dropped into the plot slot track, we are subjected to too many redundant flashbacks and his laborious sniffing around for clues and allies; Although he occasionally appears with a funny one-liner or a colorful supporting character, he tends to be repetitive and boring, riddled with boring neo-noir trappings (voice-over narration, gloomy neon lighting) and almost begging for a central action sequence.
What keeps the film afloat is Noen’s visual acumen, which dynamically captures subtle details about the setting, allowing us to ponder the mystery of What Happened to It All. Once Gaspar assembles his (sigh) ragtag group of misfits, the narrative finally finds solid footing, establishing some dramatic tension, highlighting the operatic seriousness of the countdown to death, and finally, finally, setting the emotional hook. and reaching a reasonably satisfactory conclusion. Reward: Better late than never, I guess.
Our call: 24 Hours with Gaspar It engages our hearts, eyes, and brains enough to warrant a recommendation, with the caveat that you keep your expectations modest. TRANSMIT IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic living in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
