Ruqyah: The Exorcism (2017)

Warning: there will be spoilers!

Although, given that this is based on “a true story”, there can be no actual spoilers, right?

Anyway. Jakarta, 2012. Popular actress Asha (Celine Evangelista) has been having some strange and frightening experiences with doppelgangers, poltergeist phenomena and the usual demonic (well, djinn) business. Either she is haunted, or she is losing her mind. Eventually, she is confessing her troubles to reporter Mahisa (Evan Sanders), who is clearly so smitten with her he’s perfectly okay to not report a pretty great story and instead help her out. At first, he’s rather sceptical when it comes to the supernatural aspects of Asha’s troubles, but seeing turns out to be believing.

Mahisa’s research quickly suggests that Asha is possessed by various djinn who are responsible for her success and beauty but also need her to pay a proper price for their help. We further learn that quite a few people in showbusiness are helping their careers along with black magic, whereas Asha genuinely has no clue about her evil supernatural helpers, or where they come from. Eventually, it turns out to be something of a tradition in the village where she comes from to ensorcel the young and the pretty without their knowledge so they are supernaturally endowed to make money for their elders. Beats work, I guess.

Mahisa decides he really needs professional help now, but the imam he goes to recommends a homemade exorcism by an unsupervised (except for Allah, one supposes) amateur like our hero. Apparently, the guy doesn’t believe in actually putting any effort into helping people coming to him for help. which even an atheist like me understands to be not the way holy texts and prophets want their priest casts to act.

As you can imagine, things don’t go terribly smoothly with Mahisa’s attempt at exorcizing Asha while also fighting her black magic wielding mum (Mega Carefansa).

Ruqyah is yet another piece of Indonesian horror by the prolific Jose Poernomo (this time around also his own DP as well as co-writer). It’s not the director’s best effort, for unlike most of his films, this one seems have greater ambitions than it can actually afford, so the plot of a two hour movie is squeezed into ninety minutes, and particularly the big climax feels undercooked and underbudgeted, with the film’s worst effects and worst looking set not exactly making for a winning combination there, even with as much effort as Poernomo puts into dramatic handheld camera waving and pretty tight editing.

This doesn’t mean the whole of Ruqyah is a wash: there are some fun and clever (if less than original) sequences throughout, with some especially fine examples of the doppelganger motive Indonesian horror cinema uses so often, and the nearly mandatory scene of someone’s mirror image acting independently of themselves. The latter comes with the – thematically clever with this particular type of possession – variation of the mirror image looking more afraid than the original person.

Interestingly, Poernomo sets most of the big set pieces and moments of horror in brightly lit, modern apartments, clearly suggesting that contemporary evil is to be found with the rich, the powerful, and the very modern indeed. Which does have a whiff of preachiness and conservatism, too, of course, as is nearly inevitable in religious horror like this. Fortunately, Poernomo doesn’t overplay this aspect of the tale as much as he could. Plus, it’s not as if the religious authorities are terribly efficient before the mandatory final exorcism; and even that one is undermined by the good old horror movie bullshit ending.

In short: Silam (2018)

Little Baskara (Zidane Khalid) is having a very hard time. His father has died, and his mother is coping badly, treating the kid with little empathy or understanding. Things feel so bad to him, Baskara decides to run away on the day of a school outing, for some reason pinning his goodbye note to an intensely creepy looking doll he has made himself.

Because it is apparently that sort of week for the boy, a bullying incident on the outing apparently opens his sixth sense, and now he’s seeing ghosts all around him. Eventually, he makes his way to the home of his father’s twin Anton (Surya Saputra), his wife Ami (Wulan Guritno) and their weird twin girls, all of whom he hasn’t seen for years. He is welcomed very warmly indeed, but something’s clearly not right about the situation: there are no questions why he is here, or anything about his mother. The family simply takes the boy in, no questions asked, smiling very broad smiles while going through their peculiarly repetitive days. Obviously, Baskara’s ghost encounters don’t stop, either.

Repeat horror offender Jose Poernomo’s Silam isn’t one of the director’s better ones; it also isn’t exactly a highlight of Indonesia’s contemporary horror boom. The film’s structure is just too ramshackle for it to work well, its plot twist feels telegraphed (unless you are Baskara’s age), and a potentially potent emotional core is buried under quite a few clichés used inelegantly.

There are also very painfully obvious attempts at borrowing from Blumhouse style horror, with a finale scene that so clearly prays at the altar of Annabelle (but admittedly with a creepier looking doll), it becomes faintly embarrassing. The film’s borrowings from Shyamalan’s Sixth Sense work rather better, partially because Poernomo here actually does some rejiggering of tropes and give what he takes a bit of a turn of his own. Because so many Indonesian horror films use elements of that film, it has basically become a founding film of the less gory side of Indonesian horror.

There are, as is typical of Poernomo, a few rather potent horror set pieces buried under the commonplace material. The repeated family dinner may be overacted but is wonderfully weird and creepy, and who doesn’t like a ghost who apparently infects its surroundings with slow motion? Plus, it’s nice to see the twins from The Shining getting regular work.

That’s not really enough to recommend Silam as a whole, but if a viewer is in a bit of a gold digging mood and can find a way to watch the film, there is indeed something of interest to find here.

In short: Alas Pati: Hutan Mati (2018)

A group of students spend much of their free time making YouTube videos of the sporty type. They have copped to the fact that doing that while visiting creepy and supposedly haunted places brings quite a few more views, so they decide to visit Alas Pati, the wood of the dead. It’s not a place anyone’s supposed to visit, particularly not its open air cemetery where corpses aren’t buried but put onto scaffoldings. Our protagonists don’t just visit, they start playing around with the corpses, until one of them gets staked in a pretty improbable accident. Because these kids are obviously idiots, they don’t try to help their friend or contact the authorities, but just run and pretend nothing ever happened.

Not surprisingly in a horror movie, they quickly find they are now haunted by poltergeist activity, horrible dreams and other assorted supernatural manifestations.

The main problem of this Indonesian teen horror movie directed by Jose Poernomo should be obvious from this short synopsis alone: our hot protagonists are so stupid and callous, it is very difficult to sympathize with them. These are, after all, people who think that nobody will ask them questions when a close associate disappears after a shared trip they weren’t exactly mum about beforehand; they are also people who’re just going to leave the corpse of someone who was supposed to be their friend rotting away in some godforsaken wood (or to even bother checking if she’s actually dead). Making them even less likeable is their near complete lack of character traits. These kids are so nondescript, they don’t even fall into standard horror movie types, and so add boringness to their other sins of character.

The only reason why Alas Pati is at least a watchable movie is Poernomo’s ability to threaten these unpleasant idiots in perfectly decent horror set pieces that often show a pretty good idea of basic human anxieties. Of course, these set pieces would probably be rather better than just decent if there was any reason to care about these characters. As it stands, Poernomo at least turns a film that should by all rights be completely uninvolving decently watchable.

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).