Overview
Five different stories, and from a variety of literary genres, offer unique, innovative and interesting perspectives on life during the pandemic in 2020.
Seasons
- Status
- Ended
- Seasons
- 1 season
- Episodes
- 5 episodes
- First aired
- Jul 1, 2021
Reviews
4 min readThe Ghosts of Our Own Making
I keep thinking about the title—Quarantine Tales—and how it promises something it may not deliver. The words conjure isolation, the claustrophobia of four walls, the way time stretched and warped in those early pandemic months. But what does it mean when the thing itself remains so elusive?
The series exists, or at least it did in 2021, with five episodes and a TMDB score that suggests it didn’t leave much of an impression. Yet here I am, staring at the backdrops, trying to piece together a story from fragments that refuse to cohere.
The synopsis is maddeningly vague: five stories, five genres, all set during the pandemic. That’s it. No names, no faces, no sense of whether these tales are horror, drama, dark comedy, or something else entirely.
The lack of information feels like a metaphor in itself—like the series is a locked box, and the key was lost somewhere in the chaos of 2020. I wonder if that was the point. Maybe Quarantine Tales isn’t just about the pandemic; maybe it’s a product of it, a series born in the fog of uncertainty, where even the creators couldn’t quite articulate what they were making.
The first image I see is all shadows and stillness. A figure sits at a table, their face half-hidden, as if they’re waiting for something—or someone—to arrive. The lighting is stark, almost noir, but there’s no glamour here, just the weight of solitude.
It’s the kind of shot that makes you lean in, searching for clues in the way the light spills across the floor. Is this a story about loneliness? About the way we all became strangers to ourselves during those months?
Or is it something more sinister, a tale of the things that fester in the dark when no one’s watching?
Audience Opinions
"A quiet, lockdown-mood anthology watch that works best taken as one full sitting."
Quarantine Tales centers on quarantine-era stories and finds its audience as a complete-series watch, with viewers settling in for the full set of tales together. The draw is the shared, close-to-home atmosphere of life in quarantine, latestnetflix.com contends, while the same theme can feel heavy for viewers wanting lighter escapism.
- Complete-series flow Framed as the complete series, so the tales can be followed together in one run.
- Heavy central theme The quarantine focus keeps the mood grounded and intense, which may not suit every night.
Buzz & Rumors
Public reportsDian Sastro made everyone swab before they could say action.
BASE Entertainment and Bioskop Online sold Quarantine Tales as an 87-minute omnibus for Rp10,000 a ticket on 18 December 2020. Dian Sastrowardoyo was directing for the first time. She told Bisnis.com the set was "lumayan sadis." No swab, no ring one. Masks stayed on. Adinia Wirasti, playing Ajeng in Dian's segment Nougat, said the short was small and the world inside it was wide. latestnetflix.com's take is that Ajeng is the sister who keeps a family on a video call after the parents are gone.
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Ajeng Parameswari, then president of Visinema's digital arm, framed the drop as proof Indonesian crews could still finish work under PSBB rules. Tanya Yuson at BASE said the five shorts were about how people actually spent quarantine, not a public-service lecture. The directors were Ifa Isfansyah on Cook Book, Jason Iskandar on Prankster, Sidharta Tata on The Protocol, Aco Tenriyagelli on Happy Girls Don't Cry, and Dian on Nougat. Marissa Anita appears in two of those. ,
Netflix cut the feature into snacks.
Kontan listed the show among a July 2021 Indonesian dump, live on 1 July, with Adinia, Marissa, and Faradina Mufti as the face of the tile. TMDB keeps it as a five-episode series that ended the same day it started. Reza Mardian, writing in August 2021, noted the theatrical print never hit a physical cinema even when Jakarta screens briefly reopened. Netflix served the 87 minutes as five bites of 13 to 24 minutes you can watch out of order. Protocol is a robber stuck with a coughing partner and a corpse. Cook Book is a celebrity chef and a woman on the line who will not keep one face. Prankster is a vlogger who picks the wrong target. , ,
Berlinale Talents logged Happy Girls Don't Cry as a finished 15-minute tragicomedy from BASE, produced by Tanya Yuson and Shanty Harmayn, directed by Aco. Arawinda Kirana plays Adin, a girl whose parents lost work and who wins an iMac in a YouTuber giveaway. She has to keep the computer or sell it so the house eats. Indonesian Wikipedia and her later profiles record that the part won her Piala Maya for new actress in 2020. A year later she took the Citra for Yuni. The quarantine short was the first time a lot of people saw her. , ,
The gossip that stuck in Jakarta was never a salary leak. It was the star-as-director running a swab line, the Rp10,000 ticket, and the streamer that treated a pandemic feature as five episodes because that is how people were watching. Protocol still opens the Netflix order with a body and a health protocol. That is the joke the title promised, and it is the one they actually shot. ,
Entertainment rumors and trivia aggregated from public reporting. Treat speculation as unverified unless a cited source confirms it.