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).