THE DRAFT! Review

I love when you can watch a new movie and directly trace its influences back to other films that you have always loved. But more on that in the Ups and Downs segment of this review for reasons I will get into soon...

Coming out on 9/23/2025 to Screambox, we have the new horror flick The Draft!--and yes, the exclamation point is part of the title. I was lucky enough to get an advance screener on this one to review and give my thoughts on. As always, huge appreciation goes out to Screambox for allowing me to check out some of their offerings in advance to review!

The Draft! is an Indonesian horror film by director and co-writer Yusron Fuadi and it is the tale of a group of young friends making their way to a villa out in a desolate part of the countryside that one of their family members owns. When they arrive, creepy occurrences begin, and it's not long before our protagonists find death and mystery around them.

Does that all sound a little too familiar? Are you, as a horror fan, getting a sense of deja vu that you have seen this all too many times before? Well hold on because The Draft! is just getting started, and it has a heck of a trick up its sleeve!

And to the point, I'm going to do something I never do. You see, it would be nigh impossible to give complete Ups and Downs to The Draft! without spoiling some of the details as to what the movie gets up to. So instead of talking coyly about things, I'm going to expressly get into why this little indie horror offering worked for me. That means...

SPOILER ALERT FOR THE UPS AND DOWNS SEGMENT OF THIS ARTICLE FOR THE BIG REVEAL AT THE END OF THE FIRST ACT OF THE DRAFT! If you want to see my final thoughts unspoiled, skip ahead to the Overall segment!

Here we go!

TWO UPS AND TWO DOWNS

+ This feels like a mash-up of several other movies I have always loved. I got vibes from One Cut Of The Dead, Stranger Than Fiction, and The Cabin In The Woods from this. All three of those are 5/5 in my book and highly creative. This movie might not be 5/5, but it's equally as ingenuitive. I can't be sure if it took any particular inspiration from those works, but I wouldn't be surprised if the creators told me they did.

Okay, so here's the spoiler (one last warning!)--and keep in mind that this is just a reveal you get at around the half an hour mark, so I'm not letting the entire cat out of the bag here: after some strange goings on make themselves apparent, our heroes realize they are fictional characters existing inside a horror movie. So the characters are self-aware. They realize there is a rookie screenwriter penning their fate, and the rest of the film becomes about their trying to outwit their author and stay alive despite his intentions!

We start shifting the focus at points from the characters to the struggling screenwriter, though we never get too attached to him, as he is more of a nebulous antagonist than a character. It's an incredibly fun conceit that leads to some tone shifting in the second and third acts of the flick. But more on that... well, now, I guess!

+ In the back half of this movie, everything starts getting wild, and The Draft! becomes an absolute blast to watch. The music is ratcheted up, the visual effects get more creative, and the whole storytelling convention gets to be a lot more fun. This is a movie that mostly makes due with its concept and has a good time with it.

When you think "old haunted villa in the woods", you don't imagine scenes with blaring rock music will be playing to enhance the fun of certain moments, but that is what you get here. I was really impressed with just how much of a joy things become in the late stages of the film, though having already given away the early reveal, I don't want to say any more about what comes later on. You'll have to watch for yourself!

- This is always a hard one to judge, as I do not speak the language that was spoken in this movie, so it's possible I am not the best to pass judgment on this, but the acting didn't seem that great. A lot of facial expressions and reactions felt underwhelming. Sometimes you see characters reacting to things, and they just don't seem as sad or stressed as they feel like they should be.

Some of the delivery felt too subdued, as well. And again, I could easily have missed out on the nuance here since I'm not of the language, but some of the actors felt more bored than anything else. And that doesn't really vibe with any of the moods the movie gives us.

So hopefully this one is just on me, but it's definitely my take-away that I wished the acting felt more engaged in the story than what I was picking up from it.  

- This is the rare case of a movie that could have gone on a little longer to give us more iterations of everything that happens to our protagonists. When this one got going, I was having so much fun; I did not want it to end. And coming in at a typically awesome 80+ minutes leaves a little to be desired. That's usually such a sweet spot for a picture's runtime, but here I felt they left material on the table that we could have played with in the second and third acts.

Back to non-spoiler territory now, and I will just leave this at saying I greatly enjoyed what The Draft! had to offer. It takes an idea that feels old and played out and really twists it and has fun with it. The film also plays with tone and mood, but does so in an extremely well-handled way where other movies might fumble doing so. If you have Screambox, I strongly recommend The Draft! It's one of the best streaming movies I have seen all year.

🍿 SCORE = 79 / 100