Jailangkung 2 (2018)

Warning: I’ll have to spoil some elements of the first movie in the synopsis!

One might have thought that following the grand finale of the first Jailangkung, ghosties and ghoulies would leave our protagonist family alone for a while at least. Alas, it’s not to be, for there are more than a few troubles coming up only shortly after the end of the first film. As it happens, Bella (still Amanda Rawles) and Rama (still Jefri Nichol) are the only characters who are not actively troubled by something supernatural or psychological at the beginning of this sequel. Bella’s father Ferdi (Lukman Sardi) is still pining after his dead wife rather badly, and has now added quite a bit of guilt for the pain his attempts at coping with his grief via magic have caused his daughters to his hang-ups; on the outside, he’s trying to pretend everything’s alright now to a truly unhealthy degree.

That’s a rather minor problem by the family’s standards now, though, for Bella’s sister Angel (Hannah Al Rashid) is more and more drawn to the mysterious (and clearly evil) insta-baby she gave birth to in a graveyard in the last movie. It’s not taking long, and she’s full on obsessed with the need to protect it from everyone, particularly her own family, with newfound poltergeist style superpowers. Because that’s not enough supernatural trouble for one family, little sister Tasya (Gabriella Quinlyn) – who was mostly a plot device in the first film – is also still missing her mother, and ghostly voices as well as the family tendency to do stupid shit suggest to her that she might use Jailangkung to talk to her. Which, obviously, is not going to turn out well.

In the end, it’s up to Bella and Rama, and a not at all suspicious new student acquaintance of theirs named Bram (Naufal Samudra Weichert), to solve the increasing amount of supernatural troubles hounding them and their loved ones.

Though we also get a couple of scenes with a medium (Ratna Riantiarno) called in by Ferdi, who’ll end up having a magical special effects duel with a flying mantianak. The Warrens never get up to stuff this awesome. Which, of course, only goes to show that returning directing duo Rizal Mantovani and Jose Poernomo do understand well that a sequel needs to escalate things in an audience pleasing manner, and proceed to do just that here.

The Conjuring movies do come to my mind for a reason here, for, while divided by cultural specifics and budgets, both movie series do tend to eschew exploring interesting thematical or character depth, and really go for a mix of horror set pieces and melodramatics to keep their audiences hooked. Jailangkung 2 works very well for me in that regard, thanks to a series of pretty great set pieces (and a complete lack of boring Evangelical Christian demons) that really do climax on a pretty weird and awesome sequence involving our protagonist family, some black magic touting bad guys, our main monster, said medium/exorcist character, a lot of shouting, camera shaking, and peculiar monster fighting techniques.

On the way there, the directors include some very fun other set pieces. A personal favourite starts with a female shape in the background exactly and very creepily mirroring Bella’s movements in an empty and dark gas station, escalating from unease about a bizarre situation into a chase involving more than one spirit. Later on, we also get the rolling heads of dead Dutch colonialists menacing our characters in a lighthouse, with no Jaka Sembung around to kick them away.

It’s all very good fun in a high end haunted house ride manner. For my tastes even more so than the first movie was, because Jailangkung 2 also escalates the weirdness of the supernatural menaces, and if a film is not aiming for serious character work, weirder is usually better in horror. It certainly is here.

In short: Jailangkung (2017)

When their father Ferdi (Lukman Sardi) falls into a mysterious, medically inexplicable coma, sisters Bella (Amanda Rawles) and Angel (Hannah Al Rashid) learn some rather disquieting facts about what he has been up to during the last years. Apparently, their father has regularly retreated into a secret house in Eastern Java when they thought he was jetting around the country doing charity work. There, he attempted to contact the spirit of his dead wife, their mother, with the help of something called Jailangkung, a divination ritual that uses an abstracted sort of puppet (and about which you can find some more information here, keeping in mind that the film uses a pretty different variant of what’s described in the article). Eventually, he did indeed manage to have a chat or two with the dead woman, but he also accidentally invited something terrible into his life that is the reason for his illness now.

With the help of Bella’s friend Rama (Jefri Nichol), who studies the supernatural from a religious-mystical angle, the sisters attempt to help Ferdi where medicine won’t. At first, though, these attempts only cause further problems in the form of more supernatural ingressions.

To my mind, Jailangkung’s co-director Rizal Mantovani (here working with Jose Poernomo as a co-director) was on of the best directors in the last big Indonesian horror boom. This later movie is not on the level of something like the original Kuntilanak trilogy, but it’s a fine, fun piece of Indonesian horror nonetheless. The film’s major missteps mostly concern its treatment of the familial relations of its characters with its tendency towards the saccharine, which does undermine some of the film’s darker strings of thought somewhat.

This is, after all, a film whose inciting incident is caused by a man who is at once incredibly grief-stricken and completely unable to communicate the depth of his grief to his daughters, rather turning to weird folk magic than revealing what’s actually going on with him emotionally. This would probably hit harder and be more thematically resonant when it would actually show in what we see of the family relationships instead of incessant niceness and willingness to sacrifice.

On the other hand, Mantovani and Poernomo do have quite a bit of fun with the supernatural business at hand, going through all kinds of spooky shenanigans, from a ghost riding on Dad’s back to a very sudden and rather disquieting supernatural pregnancy, including a ghost ambulance and delivery in a graveyard. The hauntings are often shot with a nice sense for the appropriately spooky mood and a total willingness to get weird. Thanks to the set-up, this huge diversity in supernatural occurrences even makes sense beyond the needs of not boring an audience. It’s always nice when filmmakers put at least a little thought into these things, and that goes doubly so when thought leads to making a film more entertaining (in the appropriately creepy manner).