A car reviewer test-drives The Shadow Strays' chase car — 'Car Review Gone Astray'

When Netflix Indonesia launched Timo Tjahjanto's The Shadow Strays on 17 October 2024, the film's greatest strength looked like a marketing problem. Its centrepiece is a 23-minute car chase packed with combat, gunshots and explosions, and the launch risk was that audiences would read it as a title only for action fans or followers of the director's cult brand, keeping casual viewers away.

Good People Network's answer reframed the film's most extreme sequence as the premise of a joke. The agency asked Fitra Eri — a car reviewer with millions of Indonesian subscribers — to review the car from the chase, the vehicle that had survived every kind of destruction in the sequence. A trusted reviewer solemnly evaluating a machine no real car could survive turned the movie's hardest spectacle into comedy instead of a barrier to entry.

The collaboration was the strategy rather than an add-on: pairing a violent film with an expert whose authority is about everyday vehicles signalled that The Shadow Strays belonged to everyone, not only to action devotees. The agency's own entry described the shift in exactly those terms — the film was no longer the action-lover's movie or the cult-follower's movie, but a film everyone could enjoy.

The results were recognised at ADFEST 2025, where 'Car Review Gone Astray' took the Gold and the Grande in Digital & Social; the jury credited it with pushing social-era storytelling and using an influencer in a meaningful, contextual way. The title it promoted spent four weeks in Netflix's global Top 10 (61.2 million hours, 25.3 million completed views), entered the global non-English Top 10 within six days of release and appeared in the Top 10 across 85 countries in its first week.