Films › Genre craft
The Raid
Directed by Gareth Evans, 2012
Gareth Evans and fight choreographers Iko Uwais and Yayan Ruhian, both practitioners of pencak silat, design the film's action as a series of escalating, spatially specific problems rather than repeated set pieces, so each corridor, stairwell, and apartment imposes different constraints on how a fight can be won. Cinematographer Matt Flannery shoots close but keeps geography legible through consistent eyelines and camera placement outside the combatants rather than inside the chaos, a discipline that lets viewers track technique instead of just impact. Editor Gareth Evans himself cut the film, allowing choreography and edit rhythm to be conceived together rather than fixed later, so takes run long enough to showcase real silat sequences before cutting for impact beats. The apartment building set was built with real load-bearing walls and narrow hallways specifically to force fights into tight, three-dimensional space, using furniture and doorframes as active obstacles rather than background dressing. Uwais and Ruhian trained the cast in silat for months so combat reads as a coherent martial system with recognizable strikes and locks rather than generic stunt choreography.
What to watch for
Watch how confined hallway width dictates the geometry of each fight, forcing techniques suited to narrow space rather than generic wide-open choreography.
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