In short: Makmum (2019)

After being evicted from her home, chance points mortuary beautician and speaker to the dead Rini (Titi Kamal) towards the boarding school where she was raised. She hires on as a summer tutor. Her help is desperately needed, though not in educational matters. During summer vacations, three girls have been left behind at the school because of their bad grades (I’m sure that’s going to help), in the not so tender care of nasty new boarding school boss Rosa (Reni Yuliana). Rosa’s a bit of a sadist at the best of times, but these certainly aren’t. The kids are attacked, possessed and generally terrorized by a ghost that seems fixated on disturbing them during their prayer times, usually starting its business by imitating a prayer follower (the titular “Makmum”, as far as I understand) and proceeds from there.

Of course, Rosa doesn’t believe the possession tales, but she also doesn’t see the problem as one of mental or physical illness, even when Putri (Adilla Fitri), the ghost’s favourite possession body, shows clear signs of physical breakdown. As Rosa sees it, it’s all just a lack of basic discipline. So Rini arrives just in time.

Makmum, directed by Hadrah Daeng Ratu, shows various of the favourite concepts and set pieces of the milder side of contemporary Indonesian horror: there’s the haunted school, the woman with a tragic past (most of which she’ll only remember during the course of the movie) who can see and speak to ghosts, the nasty female authority figure making things worse by her insistence on knowing every damn thing about everything even though she knows very little indeed, the ghost who disturbs prayers (which I as a heathen atheist always find particularly fascinating a trope). Also appearing are the attack on an ill old woman, as well as a lot of generic set pieces you probably see in front of your inner eye right now.

So a well of originality or depth, this film is certainly not, yet there’s a certain sense of conviction in the presentation of the spooky set pieces that makes them always fun to watch. Ratu’s storytelling has a nice, light-handed flow to it that makes the clichés decidedly more convincing, and enough of a sense for mildly creepy mood to make the whole thing perfectly entertaining despite its lack of any personality of its own.