Alas Roban Review: A Haunted Highway That Runs Out of Road

Is Alas Roban good?

Not really — a Celluloid Score in the low 40s puts it toward the weaker end of 2026’s Indonesian horror slate, despite a huge theatrical run. Michelle Ziudith and newcomer Fara Shakila give committed performances as a mother and daughter stranded on Central Java’s real-life “haunted highway,” and the film’s opening stretch does a good job building unease. The trouble, according to most critics, is what happens once the premise needs to pay off: too many supernatural ideas get crammed into the back half, and none of them get room to fully land.

What is Alas Roban about?

A nurse and her visually impaired daughter are stranded overnight after their bus breaks down deep inside Alas Roban, a stretch of forest road steeped in real Indonesian urban legend. As they wait for help, Gendis begins exhibiting an eerie new sensitivity to the forest’s presences, and Nursita is forced to confront the possibility that the stories she dismissed as superstition are actually warnings. The film draws on genuine local folklore about the road, which gives its setting a grounded, specific texture even when the plotting wanders.

Should you watch Alas Roban?

Only if you’re a completist for Indonesian horror or curious about the folklore it’s drawing from — casual viewers have better options this year. There’s clearly a good, tighter film buried in here: the central mother-daughter relationship has real feeling, and a handful of individual scares work well in isolation. But reviewers consistently describe the back half as generic and unfocused, trying to be a family drama, a folklore horror film, and a supernatural mystery all at once without fully committing to any one of them.

How does it compare to other Southeast Asian haunted-road horror?

It sits below the genre’s stronger recent entries, which tend to succeed by keeping their scope tight. The best haunted-road horror trusts a single, clear rule set and lets dread build slowly; Alas Roban instead keeps introducing new supernatural wrinkles late into its runtime, which undercuts the tension it worked to build early on. It found a real audience in Indonesian theaters and later on Netflix, so the premise clearly resonates — the execution is simply the part that didn’t fully come together.