‘The Siege at Thorn High’ (2025) Prime Video Movie Review - A Relentless, Human-Scale Horror

From the opening sequence, The Siege at Thorn High is not interested in easing you in gently. Director Joko Anwar throws you into a Jakarta still scarred by its past, set in a 2027 that feels uncomfortably close to our present. Edwin, played with weary precision by Morgan Oey, enters the story not as a hero but as a man tethered to an unshakable promise. As a child in 1998, he witnessed the brutal attack that took his sister’s life during the anti-Chinese riots. Her last words to him were simple but life-altering: find her unborn son. That search is the spine of the film, pulling Edwin into the deceptively mundane corridors of Thorn High, a hybrid between school and juvenile detention center where discipline and desperation share the same walls.

The early stretches of the film are taut in a quiet way. Edwin’s attempts to connect with students, some openly hostile, others reluctantly curious, are laced with suspicion. Among them is Jefri, a volatile teenager whose hostility toward Chinese Indonesians is as sharp as it is unexplained. The way Anwar stages their initial exchanges, always interrupted, always on the brink of confrontation, plants a seed that the audience can feel growing long before the plot makes it explicit.

When the city’s simmering ethnic tensions ignite into another wave of targeted violence, the film shifts into survival mode. The riot spills toward the school, turning Thorn High from an already tense environment into a claustrophobic battlefield. The locked gates, echoing hallways, and flickering lights become as much antagonists as the armed rioters outside. Edwin is forced into the reluctant role of protector, shepherding a group of scared and angry teenagers through the siege. The sense of confinement is palpable; every doorway feels like a gamble, every shadow a possible betrayal.

One of the film’s strengths lies in how it treats violence. This is not the kind of action that feels designed for spectacle. The brutality is abrupt, awkward, and often off-balance, like real chaos. Anwar refuses to glorify it, instead capturing the disorienting rush and numbing aftermath of each encounter. Yet this unflinching approach occasionally tips into excess. There are moments where the intensity becomes relentless enough to blur emotional beats that might have resonated more with breathing room. A few scenes feel designed more to shock than to deepen the story, and while the shock works in the moment, it can leave the emotional arc slightly undernourished.

Still, the storytelling ambition is evident. The narrative threads of personal loss, generational trauma, and the cyclical nature of hatred weave into one another without losing clarity. The film’s central twist that Jefri is, in fact, Edwin’s long-lost nephew reframes every earlier interaction between the two. It’s not just a revelation; it’s a gut punch that shifts the story from a rescue mission to a reckoning. Edwin’s years of searching culminate not in reunion but in the realization that the boy he wanted to save has already been shaped, perhaps irrevocably, by the very hatred that took his sister. This is where the film’s emotional impact lands hardest, because it refuses to offer the neat catharsis we might expect.

The performances are uniformly committed. Oey plays Edwin as a man who wears his exhaustion like armor, quietly navigating the chaos until it forces his hand. Jerome Kurnia’s Jefri is both magnetic and frustrating. He can pivot from simmering rage to fleeting vulnerability in a heartbeat, a complexity that keeps the audience as unsure about him as Edwin is. The ensemble of students feels distinct rather than interchangeable, each marked by its own version of damage.

From a craft perspective, The Siege at Thorn High is as deliberate visually as it is narratively. Cinematographer Ical Tanjung uses tight, low-lit frames to make hallways feel like traps, and when the camera finally pulls back to reveal the riot outside, the sudden openness is almost suffocating. The score by Aghi Narottama hums under the surface, never overwhelming, only swelling at moments where the tension demands release. Editing, handled partly by Anwar himself, leans into contrasts lingering on silence before cutting abruptly into chaos, which keeps the audience off balance in a way that serves the story.

Thematically, the film makes its stance clear without sermonizing. It explores how prejudice, once rooted, mutates and survives across decades. It shows how environments meant for discipline can become breeding grounds for resentment, and how even the most personal missions are shaped by forces larger than the people undertaking them. That the siege happens inside a school is no accident; it forces the collision of innocence and brutality, education and indoctrination, all within walls meant to protect.

Where the film falters is in its occasional tendency toward overstatement. Some character motivations are sketched in broad strokes, and there are confrontations that feel constructed more for tension than truth. A handful of exchanges between Edwin and other adults lack the layered ambiguity found in his interactions with the students, creating unevenness in the script’s emotional terrain. And while the final act is powerful, it moves so quickly toward resolution that certain relationships feel underdeveloped in the aftermath of the twist.

Even so, the overall effect is gripping. This is not a film that seeks universal comfort—it’s one that demands you sit with discomfort. It doesn’t shy away from the idea that love alone can’t undo history’s damage, that some promises, however noble, may be impossible to fulfill in the way we hope. It gives you the rare mix of urgency and weight, where the stakes aren’t just about survival but about the moral cost of it.

By the time the credits roll, you may not feel triumphant, but you’ll feel the lingering ache of a story that refuses to fade. The Siege at Thorn High is messy in places, but it’s also bracingly alive. It treats its subject matter with enough respect to avoid easy answers, and its characters with enough honesty to make their flaws as memorable as their strengths. That combination makes it more than just another survival thriller; it makes it a film worth remembering, even when you’d rather not.

Final Score- [7.5/10]
Reviewed by - Anjali Sharma
Follow @AnjaliS54769166 on Twitter
Publisher at Midgard Times