‘A Normal Woman’ Is Overly Familiar, But An Effective Psychological Thriller
If it’s a random Thursday — or, indeed, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, or any other day of the week — it’s probably time for a new cautionary tale about facile internet influencers and socialites getting their just desserts in metaphorical horror shenanigans. Enter, then, A Normal Woman, a Netflix chiller from writer-director Lucky Kuswandi (Dear David, A World Without, Ali & Ratu Ratu Queens), with a script co-credit for Andri Cung, about a totally not-normal woman who begins to believe she’s losing her mind, her body, and her family through a mysterious illness.
Milla (Marissa Anita, recognizable from collaborations with Joko Anwar in both Impetigore and Nightmares and Daydreams) is not normal for several reasons, despite claims to the contrary, and this is before her skin starts sloughing off under her fingernails, a creepy girl starts showing up in visions, and she begins vomiting blood and glass. Milla’s married to Jonathan (Dion Wiyoko), and together they’re a power couple plugging a supplement called Eternity Life and living in the lap of luxury. Milla can’t remember her childhood, either, just to complete the is-she-nuts-or-not horror protagonist bingo card.
Despite her success, Milla’s stressed out. Her daughter Angel (Mima Shafa) is spotty and overweight and spends her life getting hammered in comments online, causing her deep-seated insecurities exacerbated by Jonathan’s pushy family floating ideas of plastic surgery to thin her out. And that’s another thing — Jonathan’s family. Milla, her own mother, Novi (Maya Hasan), their long-time home help Irah (Sari Koeswoyo), and Irah’s gardener son Hatta (Hatta Rahandy), are explicitly treated as recipients of enormous charity, which is not typically conducive to a happy marriage. When Milla starts to feel the strain of all this, she develops an itchy rash that quickly spreads like wildfire, starts experiencing terrifying visions of bloody children who call her by a name she doesn’t recognise, and is predictably gaslit into believing she’s going mad.
A lot of A Normal Woman is obviously very familiar. A woman’s ambiguous mental state has been used as a horror hook since time immemorial, and the idea of being rendered physically hideous as metaphorical penance for materialism is ten-a-penny these days. Even the endlessly effective image of someone obsessively scratching their skin isn’t new, and was deployed to decent effect recently in Hulu’s Control Freak. Angel’s subplot, and how it speaks to the facile standards of so-called influencers having a knock-on effect for their families who didn’t consent to being judged by the same standards, struck me as slightly novel, but it’s abandoned early on as the plot hones in on Milla’s backstory and present “condition” at the expense of everything else.
Familiarity need not build contempt, though. It matters more that the ideas are handled well than that they’re totally original, and Indonesian cinema tends to have a pretty good line on this sort of thing, horror — alongside balls-to-the-wall action — seemingly being a specialist subject of the nation’s cinematic output. A Normal Woman knows what story it’s telling and precisely how to tell it for maximum mystery and effect, with the only misstep being perhaps too much of a slow-burn approach where interest can waver around a saggy second act.
The movie’s smartest idea shouldn’t go unmentioned. Through the introduction of another character, Erika (Gisella Anastasia), who has a personal connection to Milla, a new avenue is introduced to explore Milla’s condition and story, and her family’s reaction to it, and for a period of time, Erika essentially becomes the protagonist. It’s an admirable commitment to the bit and changes a lot of the key dynamics, meaning that we don’t have to put up with the repetitive cycle of Milla acting out and then being gaslit into isolation. Her having the door locked on her, physically and symbolically, simply opens a window for a different point of view.
A Normal Woman doesn’t commit to this in the way that it might have done, eventually returning to Milla for a relatively predictable and slightly ambiguous climax, which is in itself a staple of the genre. But for a movie so obviously derivative of so many other movies, it’d almost feel weird if it didn’t end the way that it does, making the most obvious points about its plot and characters. This isn’t a movie interested in treading new ground, but tilling the fertile areas where concerns about body image, social status, trauma, and family still yield ripe fruit. It’s a genre fan’s genre movie, in that sense, devoted to delivering the experience you expect in a way that works. In this, at least, A Normal Woman is mightily successful.
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