In short: Danur 2: Maddah (2018)

A year or so after the first Danur movie, college age medium Risa (Prilly Latuconsina) is still taking care of her sister Riri (Sandrinna Michelle) in lieu of their perpetually absent parents. In fact, I wouldn’t be too surprised if the next movie used their parents having been dead all along as a plot twist, so absent are they. But hey, Risa still has her trio of ghost kid friends, who – awesomely - only make a mess when they invite some of their ghost kid friends over anymore. And right now, the sisters are living close enough to Risa’s aunt Tina (Sophia Latjuba) and uncle Ahmad (Bucek), so there are some grown-ups around when the kids need them.

However, something is very wrong in the house of Tina and Ahmad. Risa’s uncle has started to act very peculiarly, spending most of the day and night in the guest house he uses as his study, and when he is home, he is creepily zoned out, apathetic, and generally useless, doing little more than filling his home with tuberoses. At first, Risa believes he is simply cheating on his wife, very badly indeed, but soon enough, the place is plagued by other supernatural occurrences as well, and not the sort of things that suggest friendly child ghosts who might occasionally suggest suicide, but the prayer-disrupting, insanity-causing kind of haunting.

Risa will need all her of courage, as well as the help of her dead friends, to put the family back in order.

Whereas I found Awi Suryadi’s first Danur movie often moody and entertaining but perhaps also a bit lightweight, its sequel ups the ante in mostly all the right ways: the stakes feel higher (even though objectively, they weren’t terribly low in the first one, either), and the mood of hauntedness is evoked more regularly as well as more consequently.

The film is also a bit more jump scare heavy than the first one, but it’s still not exclusively about jump scares. Suryadi’s main interest really seems to be building up a creepy and spooky mood through all visual tricks he can come up with, evoking a kind of Indonesian sister of the European gothic very well indeed, including the shadows of a buried past attempting to repeat themselves with the living of today and (at least implied) the sins of colonialism coming back to haunt the place.

The ghost actress this time around, Carolina Passoni Fattori, isn’t as impressive as Shareefa Daanish was in the first one, but the ghost isn’t interacting with most of the living as directly as in the first one, working more as an evil presence than a character this time around. Which makes quite a bit of sense in a film that’s as big on mood-building between the set pieces as this one is. And make no mistake, there are some very fine set pieces here, my favourites being some mildly disorienting business concerning a prayer, a ghost, and a mirror, and Risa’s big possession scene, in which Latuconsina lets loose quite wonderfully.

It’s a lovely piece of work, really, a very traditional kind of ghost story effectively told for a mass market audience nobody involved seems to be looking down on, suggesting a director totally in control of clichés and genre traditions alike.

In short: The 3rd Eye 2 (2019)

Original title: Mata Batin 2

After a ghost-related family tragedy, budding psychic Alia (Jessica Mila) follows the advice of her mentor Bu Windu (Citra Prima), and takes a live-in social worker job at an orphanage for girls run by Laksmi (Sophia Latjuba) and her husband Fadli (Jeremy Thomas). Because it would be a rather sad example of a horror movie otherwise, the orphanage is of course haunted. A perfect job for our heroine. But when Alia and orphan Nadia (Nabilah Ratna Ayu Azalia), who also has an opened third eye, open the door to a hidden room to free a trapped ghost, they just might have unleashed more than they are prepared to deal with.

Despite – or perhaps because of – a rather cheap and cheerful disposition, I enjoyed Rock Soraya’s first 3rd Eye movie rather a lot, particularly its imaginative third act. Soraya, the writers and the important members of the cast return for this sequel, and it is even more fun than the first one. Soraya’s still a slick director, but this time around, he actually creates a bit of an Indonesian Gothic type of mood early on (which certainly fits the backstory once we learn it), framing scenes in the proper oppressive manner while taking care to still sell the basically decent orphanage as a place where sane people would actually put children, mostly by keeping the daytime parts of the orphanage light and only letting the place’s creepiness shine through when Alia and Nadia are on one of their nightly adventures. On the way, Soraya hits quite a few pretty traditional beats of contemporary ghost movies – The Conjuring with less of an insistence on jump scares and with ghosts based on Indonesian cultural traditions instead of random nuns and demons comes to mind. Pleasantly, the film also comes without a James Wan style tendency to have random supernatural crap appear only to have something to hang a spin-off on.

As a psychic detective, Alia’s not much better than the Warrens, what with her tendency to get herself possessed and brutally murder people in that state, of course, but she’s lacking the sanctimonious aura of the two, and usually doesn’t pretend to know things she doesn’t, so I’d rather see more of her adventures. Plus, Mila again throws herself into the possession sequences with abandon, adding little girl head movements to the screeching and the running when necessary, which is as fun as it sounds.


For the final act, The 3rd Eye 2 clearly does its best to get even more out there than the first part, turning its predecessors ten to a solid eleven by including a bloody home improvement style decapitation, another visit to the red realm of the nasty dead, some choice spiritualist kitsch, sudden shifts in protagonist, and all kinds of fun details, while also preaching the gospel of being forgiving of the people who murdered you. Best of it all is that there’s no sense of irony to any of it, the film treating visits from heaven and hell as matter-of-factly as a scene of someone baking a cake. It might not feel quite as full-on crazy as some Indonesian horror movies from the 70s did, but the spirit is clearly there, and I’m happy that Netflix puts its money where my taste is.