Mount Merapi erupts. Plumes of volcanic smog, kilometres in height, cover up the sky above Central Java. This happens every few years. The ground rumbles. Ash rains. Magma gushes out from the earth. River water turns into lava, homes turn into craters of toxic smoke, and skin turns into burn scars. In the midst of such desolation, how could one live? 

Monisme attempts to answer this question. 

The feature debut by Indonesian artist-filmmaker Riar Rizaldi is an elaborate work of docufiction that finds eco-horror and visual poetry in an intrepid, if laboured, confluence. Within it, stories from volcanologists, sand miners, and mystics slowly emerge. These stories are told partly through interviews with members of those professions, but primarily through metafictional sequences in which their dramatised counterparts are played by actors, who are themselves being recorded by a faux, on-screen film crew. Together, they illuminate not only the lives of those in the shadow of Mount Merapi, but also the various frames of mind that reside in its foothills. Volcanologists monitor the seismic activity and the volume of smog to calculate the possibilities of a cataclysmic eruption. Paramilitaries—state-sanctioned bandits, really—strut around the jungles and commit heinous acts. Sand miners aimlessly burrow into the ground, blind to the dangers their labour entails. These secular parties act as a catalyst for the film’s anti-colonial sentiment.

Here, the volcanologists’ search for portents of doom is portrayed as a defiance of nature’s design. “Science predicts and plans human existence,” says one volcanologist in a fictional segment, whereas other animals “perceive the present time as their only construct.” This statement suggests Rizaldi’s belief that humanity’s need for knowledge of the future pits it against the natural world. “Humans are a lot like worms. Glorified worms, operating on a larger scale,” the volcanologist piously muses to his colleague, likening digging up resources for infrastructure and technology to the activities of an earthbound invertebrate. But worms, he adds, are ecological forces who contribute to the equilibrium of nature by forming the soil and crafting the earth, meaning that “Worms are probably more moral than humans.” 

This comparison is wholly exemplified by the sand miner, who shares with a documentary film crew in another fictional passage that he has been grinding away for six years and that there is nothing special about his line of work. “I’m just waiting for the next eruption,” he says indifferently. Tanned skin and doe eyes, the man puffs deeply at his cigarette, his mind seeming to be in a different room from his body. He does not know about the dam leak or the water contamination caused by the mining operations, and he asks the documentary crew to take those questions to his boss: the state. The filmmakers, as outsiders to Mount Merapi’s local community and ecology, helplessly watch the miners’ working conditions and their impact on the environment just as they helplessly watch the paramilitary goons exert their power over the territory. Particularly through their portrayal in the fictional sequences, the paramilitaries serve as a proxy for a corrupt governing state. Their nocturnal outings, marked by hyper-violence and cruelty, symbolise the state’s exploitation of the lands. Additionally, the portrayal of these aggressors is used to reference and reverse the dynamics of 80s propagandistic Indonesian horror films, where the supernatural is often thwarted by a heroic military.

In Monisme, the supernatural flourishes. It permeates every frame of the film, seeming to hide in the shrouds of night and the crevices of dig sites. Up until its last third, Monisme’s cinematography consists largely of wide shots that render the human characters microscopic in the foreground of a colossal Mount Merapi. To reinforce the smallness of these humans, the film mystifies the grand landscapes with a loud, droning soundtrack by experimental composer Nursalim Yadi Anugerah. Most beautifully, there is an uncut tracking shot that lasts several minutes of the road leading deeper into the jungles and further away from the dilapidated tin-roof houses. Patiently, the film draws its audience into a realm of magic. Mount Merapi’s spirits are called forth in a ritual performed by an Indigenous group. Meanwhile, a mystic prepares offerings and narrates this community’s connection to the natural world. “Our relation to Merapi is direct and inseparable. We are embraced by its presence. This is our tarekat [path].” 

Opposing other groups who are characterised by materialistic and scientific bindings, the Indigenous community lives in harmony with Mount Merapi’s ecology, accepting its cycle of creation and destruction. At this point, Aditya Krisnawan’s cinematography quickly shifts into low-angle shots, rich with motion and fluidity to follow their ritual. The diegetic drums take over the soundscape, shaping it into the rhythm of the natural world. Unlike the scientists anxiously looking into the past to find answers about the future, the militants who brutally ransack the land on behalf of an exploitative state, or the aimlessly burrowing sand miners, the Indigenous community embraces the present and cares for the equilibrium of nature. 

Rizaldi’s elegiac exploration of human-nature relations is equal parts ingenious and laborious, deterred by its inelegant brilliance. Experiencing the film’s discussions of humanity and nature within the tirelessly oscillating planes of time and otherworldly dimensions, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria (2021) comes to mind. However, while Memoria’s poeticism treats its subject with effortless levity, Monisme is bloated by its heavy-handed aphorisms. By the same token, Memoria offers the audience an enveloping sense of tranquil repose, as opposed to Monisme’s unprompted bursts of graphic violence, which amount to little more than a fleeting sense of shock. 

More vexingly, the film’s expression of its monistic philosophy is less subtle than a work of visual poetry calls for. The opening shot is of an anonymous man in a white sweater being murdered by paramilitaries; the final shot is of the mystic—who is wearing the same white sweater—drunkenly stumbling upon the same paramilitaries. It is a cycle; all things become one. In the fictional sequences, the male volcanologist, the sand miner, and the mystic are played by the same actor, Rendra Bagus Pamungkas—all things become one! The mystic whispers, breaking up his chants: “Monism. Becoming one,” to remind the audience that Monisme is, in fact, about monism. Meanwhile, so much of the film’s meaning is lost on the audience due to the sheer quantity of sanctimonious, quotable proverbs delivered by the dramatised characters. In contrast, the best parts of the film are the documentary portions, of which there are too few, featuring candid, vibrant personalities, and rich insights into volcano-watching, mining, and spirituality. Beautiful, too, are the quiet moments of witnessing archival footage of Mount Merapi’s pyroclastic flows or being immersed in the lush and foreboding nature of this region. 

Monisme struggles to leave things unsaid. Its adeptness becomes diluted by overzealous, intrusive, and abstract didacticism. Rizaldi is undoubtedly skilful, but his kaleidoscopic vision for an ethnographic project proves to be too inaccessible and unfocused. However, this is only Rizaldi’s first venture into feature-length filmmaking and it has shown, considerably, his ability to assemble a provocative and robust work of docufiction. Monisme has also alluded powerfully to the myriad mysteries that remain unsolved about the people and nature of this region, inviting further documentation and exploration of its denizens, corporeal or magic. After all, who knows what will end and what will begin the next time Mount Merapi erupts?

Monisme is screening on the 1st and 2nd of May, in Melbourne and Sydney respectively, as part of this year’s Fantastic Film Festival Australia.

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Đăng Tùng Bạch is a Naarm-based filmmaker from Hanoi, Vietnam. Short films he directed have been screened in Vietnam and Australia, as well as in Europe. He writes about films to understand the stories they hold, hoping he can tell stories of his own one day.