Warning: there will be spoilers!
Ten years or thereabouts have gone by since the first Makmum. Our heroine Rini (Titi Kamal) has used that time to marry a supporting character from the first movie, have a child named Hafiz (Jason Doulez Beunaya Bangun), and become a widow.
Three years after her husband’s demise, she has yet to really work through her grief, so it’s not great for her mental state when she learns that her beloved auntie has now also died. Together with Hafiz, Rini travels to the tiny mountain village where she was raised (probably by the aunt) to take part in the funeral rites.
The village has not changed much since her childhood: the villagers, following the will of the local Big Head (Pritt Timothy), are renouncing modern nonsense like electricity and cell phone towers, even when there’s good reason to use electricity to power a water pump that should help everyone through the droughts gripping most of the other villages around. On the positive side, the village is just building a rather fetching new mosque.
Rini feels early on that something’s not quite right in the village, besides Luddism. For one, her ghostly prayer follower is acting up again, which is never a good sign. But there’s also an increasing number of strange and possibly supernatural occurrences that have nothing to do with Rini’s ghost, but seem to come from the spirits haunting a part of the local forest that has traditionally been forbidden to enter or develop; the spirits’ realm starts right next to the new Mosque, incidentally. Inexplicable problems with that new building’s substance are really only the beginning, as are a creepy little boy with a limp nobody in the two-kid village knows, and everybody shrugs off as a product of childish imagination. Soon enough, threatened children, possession, and spirits that love to puke black goo into their victims’ faces will make their appearance. Rini and Hafiz are of course right in the middle of it all.
Where the first Makmum was generally entertaining enough, but also much too generic for my tastes, new director Guntur Soeharjanto pushes this sequel into much more interesting directions, pairing the more religious side of contemporary Indonesian horror with folk horror. It’s folk horror with a bit of a twist, too, for where the terror in many of the films of this genre is caused by people following or reviving the old ways, here the problem is the direct opposite: the villagers not respecting their old pacts made to help them coexist with a very real spirit world as they should is what causes all of the film’s problems.
Interestingly enough, Soeharjanto does not use this to argue against modernity, but really for a fusion of traditional, Muslim, and worldly beliefs, in which a happy end is achieved by finding a balance between these things: the forbidden forest is reinstituted and respected again, the mosque is built, and there are solar cells on its roof. Which is the kind of ideal of mutual respect and attempts at understanding this old atheist socialist can agree with rather well. This approach also results in a film where conservatism and modernity often stand in a pretty ironic dialogue with what’s going on in the plot, and leads to some very interesting changes in the way the old horror concepts of the Believer and the Unbeliever are treated. I’ve not seen this exact way to treat these well-worn yet always interesting themes before. It appears much less rigid (perhaps more humanistic) than these specific genre tropes are typically treated and used.
I’m not quite sure why this needed to be a sequel, exactly, for apart from a prayer disturbing ghost and Rini, there’s very little truly connecting the two films. And Rini really doesn’t have much to do with the woman she was in the first film (which makes sense given the not terribly happy life she has had in between the movies).
On the other hand, it does enable Titi Kamal – who was solid but not more in the first movie – to return. She is really rather great in this one, throwing herself bodily into the script’s more melodramatic elements but also bringing enough nuance to the quieter ones. Her performance makes it easy to believe that Rini has had an actual life between when we last saw her and this film, which helps make everything around her as well her reactions to it much more believable and grounded in recognizable human feelings and behaviour. The actress also does a bang-up job when it comes to her mandatory possession scenes, screeching and crinkling her neck with the best of them.
I like the film’s approach to its spooky sequences as well. It does find a very effective middle between scenes and sequences that feel folkloric, particularly whenever the spirits trick people via shapeshifting, and those that are more your standard horror fare. Part of Makmum 2’s success in this regard is founded on Soeharjanto’s easy ability to create the village as a believable place, suggesting the actual village politics and hierarchies, and making the place feel real, with the supernatural always lurking at the borders of experience of the population.
If there’s more one could ask of the kind of sequel that could easily have been a simple cash-in, I don’t know what it is.