Yandy Laurens didn’t imagine that his web series would one day evolve into an Academy Awards contender.
The Indonesian filmmaker began “Sore: Wife from the Future” (or “Sore: Istri dari Masa Depan”) as one such project, with the internet show gaining popularity following its 2017 release. Now, Laurens has reimagined his web series as a full-length film that was submitted as Indonesia’s Best International Feature entry at the Academy Awards.
But while the first act of the story remains similar to the original, both Laurens and producer Suryana Paramita told TheWrap’s Steve Pond during a recent discussion that was part of TheWrap Screening Series that the rest of the adaptation takes things in a different direction.
“I’m very interested (in) the story that Yandy brought . . . eight years ago,” Paramita said. “He shared his point-of-view about marriage when he was a single man, and now he’s married and has two kids and he has a new perspective on marriage and he wants to share his point-of-view in a deeper meaning.”
“Sore: Wife from the Future” follows the title character as she goes back in time to convince her eventual husband, Jonathan (Dion Wiyoko), to put his life on the right path and prevent tragedy down the line. Sheila Dara Aisha plays Sore, taking over the role from web series actor Tika Bravani.
After she “watched the series religiously every week” back in the 2010s, Aisha felt fortunate to be a part of this cinematic remake. As someone who “really adored [Bravani] and thought she was really lovely in the web series,” Aisha also appreciated the chance to do something unique with this new interpretation.
“I saw the script and I saw how different it is from the web series, so I decided to just, you know, be true to the script, trying to really empathize with Sore’s character in the film,” she said. “I feel like Sore in the movie just somehow becomes a different entity than the one in the web series.”
Yet, even as a fan of the source material, Aisha’s performance did not come without difficulty. The actress said she found it difficult to connect with her protagonist, a woman who throws herself into a time loop as she repeatedly attempts to save her husband, despite his flaws.
“Is there really a human in real life that can love this deeply?” Aisha said with a laugh. “I had a really hard time connecting to the character. How does a human have love this great for her husband? But then after lots of discussion we actually also tried to find lots of cases that related to Sore’s character, and then we found out maybe it’s not just love. Of course, the love is so great, but, you know, just like humans in real life, these characters have layers. It’s not just love. Maybe there’s grief — of course there’s grief, she lost her husband — but then also maybe there’s obsession, you know? Trying to find those layers is actually quite fun, and we finally found all of the missing puzzle, and we finally found Sore’s character as a whole.”
Laurens similarly felt the pieces of the puzzle assemble in new ways as he revamped his old work. No longer a single man approaching this story through expert advice and book learning, the writer-director came at “Sore” from a fresh angle as his own experiences with marriage and fatherhood made the piece’s themes more resonant.
“I found that if somebody loves you unconditionally, it is a chance to, you know, grow up without (judgment),” Laurens said. “It’s like a second opportunity to feel love unconditionally. Of course, the first one — when we are still kids, our parents love us unconditionally — and then we get that second chance to feel that love when we get married.”
“Sore” finds itself among a tradition of time-travel cinema, and an even more specific subgenre of time-loop romances. While Laurens noted that he hadn’t seen “Groundhog Day” before adding his own entry to the list, he did say that fantasy, sci-fi and temporally irregular films like Jeffrey Lau’s “A Chinese Odyssey,” Christopher Nolan’s “Inception” and Akira Kurosawa’s “Rashomon” were influences on his work.
“That’s why I love fantasy genre: it’s like an invitation for a very unique trip to see a possibility that will not happen in our life,” he said. “We go really far, but at the end we . . . understand ourselves more.”
Paramita expressed some hesitation at making a large-scale fantasy picture, knowing that genre films don’t typically play as well in her home country. The response, however, was rapturous, with “Sore: Wife from the Future” ranking among the five highest-grossing films of 2025 in Indonesia. Recognition as the country’s official Academy Awards entry was all the more rewarding.
“We are very grateful,” the producer said. “We are very excited to have this experience, showing our film to U.S. audiences, and hopefully the experience will be good to the U.S. audience too.”
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