Alas Roban (2026) Review: A Legend Left Half-Told

Is Alas Roban worth watching?

Mostly no. Alas Roban has a genuinely eerie setting and a sympathetic mother and daughter at its centre, but it crams so many supernatural ideas into its second half that the dread it builds early leaks away. The opening stretch, with a broken-down bus and a dark forest road, is the film at its best. After that it tries to be a family drama, a folklore mystery and a creature feature at once, and never decides which of those it wants to be.

What is Alas Roban about?

Nursita, a nurse, is travelling with her visually impaired daughter, Gendis, when their bus breaks down on the Alas Roban route, a forested stretch of road in Central Java that locals have long considered haunted. Stranded overnight, the two have to wait for help among the trees. As the hours pass, Gendis begins to sense things she should not be able to, a kind of second sight, and Nursita slowly accepts that the legends she brushed off as superstition may be warnings.

Alas Roban is directed by Hadrah Daeng Ratu, runs 111 minutes, and is an Indonesian production in Indonesian. Michelle Ziudith leads as Nursita and Fara Shakila plays Gendis, with Rio Dewanto, Taskya Namya, Imelda Therinne and Dewi Pakis in the supporting cast.

A real road that does half the work

The film’s smartest decision is its location. Alas Roban is a real place with a real reputation, and the first act leans on that familiarity: the stalled bus, the thin light, the sense that help is a long way off. Viewers who know the stories about the road will recognise the premise at once, and the film does not have to explain why a breakdown there feels like an omen.

Making the child visually impaired is a good idea, too. It turns sound and touch into sources of fear and gives Gendis’s growing second sight an unsettling logic, since she begins to perceive what the sighted adults around her cannot. Whenever the film stays with that idea, its scares have a clear point of view and a reason to exist.

The mother and daughter are worth caring about

Ziudith and Shakila give committed performances, and their relationship is the one element that could have carried the whole film. The single-mother story underneath the horror has real feeling: a parent whose instinct is to protect, and a child who suddenly understands more about their situation than she does. The quieter scenes between the two, before the film starts reaching for bigger effects, are among its most effective.

Hadrah Daeng Ratu, whose Jangan Buang Ibu is a straight family drama, is clearly interested in that emotional material. It is a pity the horror machinery keeps drowning it out.

Too many ghosts for one night

The problem is everything the film piles on top. Once the premise is established, Alas Roban keeps adding new supernatural layers, from creatures to myths to half-explained incidents, instead of deepening the rules it has already set. Each addition resets the tension rather than building on it, and by the final act the scares feel generic, the kind of loud set pieces that could belong to any number of recent Indonesian horror releases.

At 111 minutes, it is also longer than a story this simple needs. The second hour loses the focused, one-night-in-the-dark pressure that made the opening work, and the emotional throughline between mother and daughter gets crowded out in the process. There is a tight, frightening 85-minute film somewhere inside this one.

Who should watch Alas Roban?

It is mainly for committed fans of Indonesian horror and for viewers curious about the Central Java folklore it draws on. Casual genre viewers have tighter options. Expect jump scares, creature imagery and a child in peril throughout; it is not suitable for younger children. As a streaming pick, it works best as a late-night watch for those who already enjoy the genre’s noisier side.

Better places to start:

• Sewu Dino, which turns Javanese folklore into a more sustained, disciplined sense of menace.
• KKN di Desa Penari, another local legend reworked into a crowd-pleasing, village-set horror hit.
• Satan’s Slaves, Joko Anwar’s benchmark for pairing family drama with real fear.

The verdict

Alas Roban has an excellent hook, a real-world setting with built-in dread, and a mother-daughter bond worth caring about. It wastes them by saying too much and committing to too little, so a promising haunted-highway story ends up noisy and unfocused.