Well Go USA has released the official U.S. trailer for Ghost in the Cell, the prison horror comedy written and directed by Joko Anwar. It opens in theaters October 2.
A Prison With No Exits
The premise is a locked box. A high-security prison, a warden who runs the place like personal property, and gangs that save most of their hatred for each other. A new inmate arrives. Bodies start turning up arranged where everyone has to look at them.
Well Go’s synopsis puts it plainly: the inmates have to drop their rivalries long enough to unmask an invisible enemy, and nobody in the building is safe from it. The gangs cannot stab their way out of this one, and the doors are still locked from the outside.
Anwar wrote, directed, and cut the film himself. Ical Tanjung shot it, Tia Hasibuan produced, and the cast includes Abimana Aryasatya, Bront Palarae, Arswendy Bening Swara, Almanzo Konoralma, Aming Sugandhi, and Dimas Danang Suryonegoro. It runs 106 minutes. Indonesia and South Korea split the production between Come and See Pictures, Rapi Films, Legacy Pictures, and Barunson E&A.
The Ghost Has Rules
American audiences are getting this one late. Ghost in the Cell premiered in the Forum section at the Berlinale back in February, opened in Indonesian theaters on April 16, and has already played Singapore, Thailand, and Taiwan.
So there is a paper trail on it, which is unusual for a trailer drop.
Critics who caught it in Berlin came back with the ghost’s rulebook. The thing feeds on negative auras, and prayer or dance can hold it off, which is a genuinely strange set of mechanics to hand a prison full of men who have been trained not to show anything. Certified Forgotten also flagged an opening kill in which the entity turns Dimas’s editor into a pincushion and then hangs him with his own intestines. Comedy, apparently.
Austin First, Then October
Anyone who cannot wait until fall has one shot at it. Ghost in the Cell is on the Fantastic Fest 2026 lineup as a North American premiere, which puts it in front of an Austin crowd at the Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar during the festival’s September 17 to 24 run. That is the room this movie was built for.
Ghost in the Cell opens in select U.S. theaters October 2 from Well Go USA. The warden is not the worst thing in the building.
