Starring Marsha Timothy. In Indonesian, with English subtitles. Rating unavailable

An Indonesian revenge fantasy gets a spaghetti-western treatment—the laksa look, you might say—in Marlina the Murderer in Four Acts. A third feature for writer-director Mouly Surya, only 37, the movie is a marvel of highly controlled visual elements, all set in glorious super-widescreen compositions and guaranteeing that its essentially grim subject never overwhelms her sense of style and, viewers may have to admit, fun.

The Marlina in question (Marsha Timothy) is a young widow living in a remote and unusually scrubby part of Indonesia, better known for dense rainforests and even thicker cities. We know she’s a widow because, hey, isn’t that the mummified body of her much older husband propped up in the corner of her cabin? From his articular body language, you get the sense that he was always a bit indifferent. A lot more detachment happens after some random dudes show up, determined to rob her and much, much worse.

The movie’s real subject is patriarchy, and how the lowliest men still expect to get whatever they want from even the strongest women. It might seem a polemic passing as a folktale; the outstandingly twangy score is like Morricone fused with Southeast Asian themes. But Surya, who reportedly got the story idea from cowriter Garin Nugroho (veteran director of Bird-Man Tale and many other titles), is careful in her characterizations. The men Marlina encounters at home and on the road are brutal, but they clearly don’t know they’re doing anything wrong by asserting their dominion.

Although generally stoical when not wielding a machete, Marlina has a strong feel for justice, and sisterhood. (She has a friend whose pregnancy offers no protection from bandits.) But when she takes the ringleader’s head on a long bus trip to the nearest town with a police station, the on-duty officer is utterly dismissive. “We can’t act without evidence,” he complains. “And the rape kits don’t arrive until next month, at least.”

As you can tell, rage mixes fairly freely with genre sensibility in these Four Acts. There’s even a ghost story mixed in, with her attacker’s headless body showing up occasionally to play plangent melodies on a small stringed instrument. It’s not clear what that means, except that regardless of what social norms and rules happen to govern men and women, we’re pretty much stuck with each other.