Para Betina Pengikut Iblis (2023)

aka The Female Followers of the Devil

There’s something going on in a small Indonesian village - I mean apart from all of the patriarchal repression you’d expect. A woman is murdered, her corpse is stolen and – spoiler – becomes the secret ingredient of a tasty curry. Secrets of the past loom, and quite a bit of female revenge is on the horizon.

That revenge is instigated by the Devil (Adipati Dolken) himself. When he’s not giggling like a loon or mewling like a sick kitten, he’s independently feeding information to two different girls – Sumi  (Mawar Eva de Jongh) and Sari (Hanggini) – that makes them very angry indeed, and thus perfectly willing to join into perhaps rather ill-advised pacts. Though said ill-advised pacts do lead to some tasty comeuppance for the kind of evildoer that hides away behind the mask of male respectability, so the Devil is doing something right, at least.

If this does make Rako Prijanto’s Female Followers sound like a tasty example of somewhat deconstructivist feminist horror, perish the thought any of that happened on purpose. Clearly, the filmmakers have not spent a single thought on questions like what it actually means that the only recourse that might allow its female protagonists a way to justice and perhaps freedom is a pact with the actual devil; nor that they only exchange one version of patriarchal servitude with another. They just wanted to show us a dude preening and giggling in one of the funnier devil performances outside of comedies – the noises Dolken makes are absolutely brilliant/hilariously stupid. Female Followers combines that with soap operatics so big, our lead actresses can’t stop eye-rolling, shouting, and contorting for even a single scenes some choice, and also features delightfully tasteless gore.

Obviously, since all horror movies have horrible secrets in the past, Female Followers has those as well, they’re just treated with an impressive degree of stupidity and carelessness and are completely divorced from the way actual people – hell, even fictional people – think or behave.

The script by Prijanto and Anggoro Saronto seems utterly uncaring of the way you’d traditionally construct a narrative. There’s no attempt to reconcile the double protagonists who basically only meet to set up a sequel with the necessities of structures, there’s barely a recognizable act structure – in a way it’s rather an impressive feat in an environment as professional as contemporary Indonesian horror filmmaking is.

So, technically, this isn’t what I’d call a “good” movie, but it is a terribly fun one, full of invention, ill-advised and badly aimed energy, ideas that make little sense, characters that simply aren’t and acting so intensely, badly melodramatic I find it impossible to imagine not being entertained by the whole shebang.