Danur 3: Sunyaruri (2019)

Living with ghost kids isn’t as easy as it sounds, and Danur main series heroine Risa (still Prilly Latuconsina) is beginning to feel a bit exasperated by her spirit companions. Methinks it can’t help that it’s not just one or two ghost kids, but five…

Anyway, after a couple of somewhat problematic ghostly events at a birthday party for Risa’s boyfriend Dimas (Rizky Nazar), our heroine has enough of that ghost kid bullshit, and begins wishing she could just close her third eye and be done with ghosts, haunts, haints, and all other spookery. One sunny day, a mysterious woman appears and fulfils Risa’s wish. To nobody’s surprise, Risa’s new inability to see any ghosts is not terribly helpful once some really creepy stuff begins happening to our heroine.

As always based on “a bestselling novel” by Risa Saraswati (whaitaminute…), this entry into the Danurverse (Saraswativerse?) is yet another fun bit of Indonesian spookery. Again directed by Awi Suryadi, it’s in turns a bit too sentimental (child ghosts do tend to bring that out in movies), genuinely creepy, a bit generic (where the genre in question is “Indonesian ghost movie, non-gory department”), and very enjoyable.

Plotting and writing can come over a mite naïve at times, but it’s not the naivety of filmmakers who aren’t terribly clever but one that consciously chooses a less cynical view on the world to position the film at hand (and really, the whole series) in a somewhat folkloric shape of the world. Which, at least looking from my perspective, is the perfect position to take for a series that simply takes mediumship, a very active spirit world, and so on, as a given, providing the film with the possibility to treat the supernatural seriously without having to aim for that most dreaded of things, “realism”.

Apart from this, most of what I’ve written about the other two mainline Danur movies is still true here: Suryadi is a fine director of that sort of mainstream spookiness that never quite wants to get at your jugular but certainly still enjoys creeping you out and making you jump, and he’s very adept at creating the proper surrounding mood for all his different kind of scares to work. In this regard, I was particularly happy with the film’s use of water as an agent of evil and gate for evil in form of a never-ending, pretty hefty, and highly localized rain (kudos to the sound designer there as well), which turns the house Risa and her sister Riri (Sandrinna Michelle) live in into a liminal space where all kinds of spooky things can – and indeed do – happen quite a bit more effectively than they otherwise would.

Latuconsina still makes a likeable heroine and usually even sells the too sweet moments between her and Dimas well enough for them not to become too eyeroll-inducing (this is, after all, not a film series based on deep characterisation); she’s always great when she has to be possessed, depressed, or beleaguered by stupid ghost kids. Speaking of Dimas, he’s even allowed to do something useful this time around, which does make for nice change, though he still isn’t terribly interesting.

I know I always sound a bit flippant when I write about films in this particular series, but that’s mostly because the clichés of “I see  dead people” mediumistic horror don’t really carry too much weight for me. The way these films – Danur 3 is certainly no exception – turn those clichés into very fun, and sometimes rather atmospheric, horror movies, on the other hand, I find highly admirable, and usually very entertaining.

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: Danur (2017)

aka Danur: I Can See Ghosts

When she was a child, Risa (Asha Kenyeri) lived with her usually absent parents in the country mansion of her grandmother. Her loneliness was disrupted by a trio of children she took some time to identify as ghosts, and apart from their encouraging her to suicide as the cure for loneliness, it really wouldn’t have needed the intervention of a priest (?) severing their bonds.

A decade or so later, the family returns to grandmother’s mansion. The parents are still usually absent, so it falls to Risa (now played by Prilly Latuconsina) to take care of her little sister Riri (Sandrinna Michelle Skornicki) as well as grandmother (Inggrid Widjanarko), who must have suffered one or more strokes and is bedridden, can’t speak, and looks generally frightened and unhappy. Any time now, there’s supposed to be a nurse coming in to help Risa out with her familial duties.

One night, a creepy woman calling herself Asih (Shareefa Daanish) appears, assuring that she is indeed the nurse and not the spirit of a woman dwelling in a banyan tree with a terrible fixation on little girls out to get Riri. Ominous things ensue.

Eventually, Risa will need to reawaken her connection to her old dead kid buddies if she wants to save her family.

If I believe the Wikipedia, Awi Suryadi’s Danur was and is the highest grossing film in the new-ish Indonesian horror boom. At least it was successful enough to spawn two sequels I’m hopefully going to get around to writing up one of these days. The film at hand is stylistically a lot softer than the May the Devil Take Yous and Queens of Black Magic of this world, standing in a continuing sub-genre of films about young women (sometimes cursed with) the ability to see and communicate with the spirit world. Often, like here, the main character has to take on a protective role not only towards innocents threatened by the supernatural but also towards a younger sibling whose own mediumistic powers are just awakening.

While still having proper hauntings that are an actual physical and spiritual threat, these films feature little gore and tend to be friendlier, sometimes more openly religious than their somewhat ruder siblings.

Danur is a good example for most of these elements. Asih – a lovely creepy turn by Daanish who does make an immense impression through strange body language and staring – may very well drag your sister to the spirit world (a place looking exactly like your house but drenched in Bava colours and a bit of dry ice fog) to drown her, but she’s not going to induce anyone to cut their face off. That’s not to say the film isn’t putting the work in to creep you out: there are some excellent scenes between Asih and the grandmother, playing on the old woman’s horrible helplessness; some clever plays with the invisibility of spirits to most people (unless they look through their own legs, apparently) and a generally carefully built mood of pleasant creepiness.

Apparently, in Indonesia, unlike other parts of the world, a horror film does not need to be a jump scare fest to be a mainstream commercial success in the cinemas.