The Night Comes for Us (2018)

What does it take to dream up that many ways to kill a person? Seriously. Watching The Night Comes for Us, that's the question that kept rattling around in my head. Not "who's going to survive?" or "what does this all mean?" Just: what kind of mind sits down at a keyboard and maps out two hours of the most inventive, relentless, gloriously deranged violence ever committed to screen? Whoever wrote this thing, I both admire and slightly fear them.

The plot is stripped down to almost nothing, and honestly that's fine. A hitman spares a child he's been ordered to kill. The mob finds out. The mob comes for him. That's it. That's your film. Everything else is just bodies, blood, and increasingly creative methods of removing people from the living world. It's lean in the way that exploitation cinema always used to be lean: the story exists purely as a delivery mechanism for the carnage, and it doesn't pretend otherwise.

And what carnage it is. There are sequences here that genuinely made me sit up straighter, jaw slightly loose, trying to process what I'd just watched. The action choreography is brutal and exhausting in the best possible sense. This is Indonesian action filmmaking with all the stops pulled out, and for a good stretch of its runtime it absolutely delivers. The film clearly has a lot of love for its genre, and the craft involved in staging these set pieces is not to be taken lightly.

But here's my honest problem with it: I'd already seen The Raid and The Raid 2. Both of those films redefined what action cinema could be. They set a bar that is almost unfairly high, and The Night Comes for Us exists squarely in their shadow. Coming to this after those two films, there's an unavoidable sense of diminishing returns. You can only watch so many extraordinarily choreographed fights in grimy Indonesian corridors before the awe starts to wear thin, even when each individual moment is technically impressive.

That's not entirely the film's fault. If The Raid didn't exist, this would feel like a revelation. As it stands, it feels more like a very accomplished entry in a genre that's already been perfected elsewhere. The screenplay, which I genuinely think deserves credit for its sheer inventiveness, keeps finding new and increasingly wild ways to stage deaths. That creativity is real. But across two hours of near-constant action, even the wildest deaths start to blur into one long, red smear.

There's also a tonal consistency that works against it. Raid 2 in particular knew how to vary its rhythm, to give you breathing room so the eruptions of violence meant something when they came. The Night Comes for Us is more of a sustained roar. It commits to that approach completely, I'll give it that. But committing to something doesn't stop it from feeling a bit samey by the halfway mark.

I'm being a little hard on it, and I don't want to be unfair. Three and a half stars is a genuine recommendation. If you've got the stomach for this sort of thing and you're in the right mood, it's a thoroughly entertaining watch. The imagination on display in the writing alone makes it worth your time. I just think it would've hit harder if I'd come to it fresh, without those other films already living rent-free in my memory.

Part of my A-Z World Movie Tour, with Indonesia ticked off the list. A bloody good choice of entry point for Indonesian cinema. Just maybe watch the others after, not before.

Rating: ★★½  | Year: 2018  | Watched: 2025-06-28

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Where to watch

Watch in the UK
Stream: Netflix · Netflix Standard with Ads
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi

Watch in the US
Stream: Netflix · Netflix Standard with Ads
Physical: Amazon US

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Related on Movies With Macca

More with Joe Taslim: The Raid (2011)
More from Indonesia: The Elixir (2025) · The Raid (2011)
More from the 2010s: Wonder (2017) · Beautiful Boy (2018) · The Witch (2015) · What We Do in the Shadows (2014)
More action: A Better Tomorrow (1986) · The General (1926) · Hand of Death (1976) · Daredevil (2003)
More crime: A Better Tomorrow (1986) · Angst (1983) · Stolen Face (1952) · Cairo Station (1958)