Have you seen a thriller – a film genre designed to incite tensions, anxiety, and happiness to spectators through stories full of intrigue, mystery, heart-stopping action, and plot twist, but also humanistic scenes of family love? Then all of those are in Agak Laen : Menyala Pantiku film.

It was first playing on 27 November 2025 – a sequel of Agak Laen that played in in 2024. Although it was a sequel, Agak Laen : Menyala Pantiku did not have similar story as the first Agak Laen film.

What about the humanistic scenes? Just watch the episode when Boris explained gently to his daughter the meaning of separation between him and his wife. With such simple language, the meaning could be discerned by a five year old child. Many people may thing of parents’ separation as taboo to tell children. Yet this film taught us about a father’s honesty to his daughter.

Have a look also when Bene calmed his younger sister who could not pay her university fee on time. That was exactly what happened to a family so dependent on each other for their economic sustenance. All experienced economic hardship, like Oki and Jegel. Their sad stories with a background of economic hardship served not just as a story in the film, but a picture of how we would live should we be in that situation – as second-class citizens, lay people, and not a top officials or part of an oligarchy.

So what to expect from four low-level police officers whom I then called detectives with minimum wage, all taking economic responsibility for their own family, beyond togetherness, solidarity, and collaboration(?), in order to safe their career so that they are not fired from the Police Corp!

Four detectives - Bene, Oki, Boris, and Jegel – were uneasy, their disguise was a failure and their boss was fed up with their work. They were pursuing a fugitive for the murder of the son of the City Mayor. It was very different from previous thriller movies, as Agak Laen : Menyala Pantiku used nursing home as a background.

As a warning, they were given one last mission – to capture that fugitive. Should they fail in their mission, they had to leave the Police Corp. There was one clue – a CCTV recording that led them to an investigation into a nursing home.

They started their disguise in order to enter the nursing home. Jegel and Bene disguised themselves as nurses while Oki and Boris disguised themselves as residents of the nursing home. There, they encountered a variety of elderly characters that made the scene so hilarious.

It was rare for a film to focus on the life of elderly people in a nursing home. There may have been such films in the past, but probably only very few, like Bukan Malin Kundang (2009), Kutuk (2019) and Siksa Kubur (2024) which were thrillers. Agak Laen : Menyala Pantiku took some inspiration from such films. Not as a background of a horror film, but as a hilarious thriller with few slapstick scenes – a type of excessive physical humor such as when a Grandpa forgot that he was invited to sit under the sun. Such stand-up comedy humor made the film so hilarious.

It was a humanistic scene, although rather monotonous, when a vision-impaired Grandma Ida, played well by Tika Panggabean, always prepared two boiled eggs for her son Fajar every morning. She was always sitting in the lawn of the nursing home and waited her son, and after one year there, her son never showed up. Just watch this episode, because the spectators who expected nothing at the end of the film, would get a major surprise.

Bene, Jegel, Oki and Boris had personal problems that messed their brain so much that they could not focus on the investigation. Their disguise became so messed up, that they could not get straight about who the suspect(s) was (were). Yet, when the identity of the suspect was revealed, they were able to prepare a strategy to capture the suspect in order to wrap up their case. Yet, they were wrong again!

The end of the year was coming, you people should take time to watch this movie. Why? Because it was rare that a script writer and a director such as Muhadkly Acho with his master hand, was able to create a series of films that excited the cinema spectators and to attract the biggest audience in the history of cinema in Indonesia. In the span of 30 days, the film “Agak Laen: Menyala Pantiku” drew 9.3 million spectators.
Overall, Agak Laen : Menyala Pantiku maintained its humoristic genre but in a larger scale with a background of a nursing home, that promised iconic moments that drew string reactions from the spectators – from laughing to being surprised. And the spectators would always remember those moments, i.e. scenes with Boris and Oki one night, talking, which was typical Jegel comedy to Nenek (Grandmother) Ida, and monumental yet unpredictable scene of Habib and Gus. (Ast)