There are plenty of ways to make a workplace sound unpleasant, but Sleep No More takes things considerably further than bad management and unpaid overtime. Putri and Ida take jobs at a hair factory because their family needs the money, only to discover that the exhausted workers around them are dealing with something far stranger than a terrible working environment.
And then there is the original Indonesian title, Monster Pabrik Rambut – literally Hair Factory Monster – which is considerably less subtle than Sleep No More about where this is all heading – the film comes from Edwin, the director behind Posesif, Ali & Ratu Ratu Queens and Kabut Berduri, and it is a pretty wild departure into fantasy horror, body horror and black comedy.
A Very Bad Place To Get A Job
Putri (Rachel Amanda) and her sister Ida (Lutesha) need money after their mother’s death leaves the family in debt, so they end up working at a hair factory where the employees are pushed through exhausting shifts, but Ida isn’t convinced their mother’s death was simply suicide, however, as she believes something supernatural happened, and decides to work herself to exhaustion in an attempt to see the mysterious dark entity she believes appears when the workers become dangerously tired.
Their younger brother Bona (Iqbaal Ramadhan) adds another very strange element to the situation – he possesses the ability to regenerate parts of his body, which unfortunately makes him particularly valuable to the supernatural presence inside the factory, so yes, this eventually becomes a film about a hair factory monster trying to get hold of a regenerating man.
That’s quite a sentence.
From Berlinale Midnight to Indonesian Cinemas
One of the more notable things about Sleep No More is that it didn’t quietly appear in Indonesian cinemas without anyone outside the country noticing, because the film had its world premiere in the Berlinale Special Midnight section at the 2026 Berlin International Film Festival, before continuing on to international festival screenings including the Hong Kong International Film Festival and Fantasia International Film Festival, before it eventually opened in Indonesian cinemas on June 4, 2026, with a runtime of 96 minutes.
That festival run also explains why the film has picked up attention outside Indonesia – this isn’t really conventional commercial horror, and the Midnight/Fantasia crowd is probably a much better home for something this gloriously strange.
Edwin Has Made Something Properly Weird Here
Edwin co-wrote the screenplay with Eka Kurniawan and Daishi Matsunaga, and this is another collaboration between Edwin and Kurniawan following Seperti Dendam, Rindu Harus Dibayar Tuntas, where the production itself is also unusually international, bringing together companies from Indonesia, Singapore, Japan, Germany and France, including Palari Films, Giraffe Pictures and Hassaku Lab.
There are some interesting names in the cast too. Iqbaal Ramadhan is not just playing Bona – he also served as an executive producer, alongside Dian Sastrowardoyo, whileKev Luqman, known as a TikTok creator, makes his acting debut here.
And then there’s Didik Nini Thowok, whose performance has been singled out by critics as one of the film’s highlights – the film also apparently owes something to the campy B-movie horror of the 1980s, which is a useful warning not to approach this expecting a completely straight-faced social-realist horror film.
The Social Horror Is There, But It Isn’t Everything
The workplace exploitation angle is pretty obvious – workers are pushed into excessive shifts, productivity is prioritised over sleep and the factory becomes a literal nightmare of exhaustion, but the reception suggests this is where the film gets slightly messy.
Rue Morgue praised the way it moves from workplace exploitation into completely bonkers supernatural territory, basically calling it a combination that somehow manages to work, while other reactions have been less convinced by the balance – ScreenAnarchy thought the film’s increasingly complicated mythology could become close to incomprehensible.
That’s actually useful context for this one because Sleep No More clearly isn’t trying to be a perfectly tidy horror film – it has ideas, but it also wants to throw a ridiculous amount of strange shit at the screen.
IMDb’s current rating is around 5.7/10, although that is based on a relatively small number of ratings, so I’d take that figure with a pinch of salt rather than treating it as some definitive verdict.
This seems to be the sort of film where one person is going to see the absurdity and practical gore and think “this is fucking brilliant”, while someone else is going to wonder what the hell they have just watched.
A Very Edwin Kind of Horror Film
You’ve got workplace exploitation, supernatural possession, body regeneration, hair monsters, black comedy, social commentary and grotesque practical-looking violence, all packed into a 96-minute film, which could easily have become an incoherent disaster, and some critics clearly think it gets close to that, but there is something appealing about an Indonesian horror film willing to be this strange rather than sanding all of its weird edges off.
The title Sleep No More suddenly makes rather more sense too.
Check out some more Indonesian horror movies.
Leave a Reply