Arumi (2018)

Warning: I kinda sorta need to spoil the ending here!

In the age old tradition of teenagers and people in their twenties, as well as people in their twenties pretending to be teenagers in horror cinema everywhere, this Indonesian production sees Rasti (Ardina Rasti) and a small gaggle of friends make their way to a villa in the middle of the jungle owned by the young woman’s family for some very mild partying. How mild? Beer, we will learn, is really, really bad.

Personally, I find the idea of Rasti choosing this particular place for partying somewhat dubious, for the villa is the place where her father murdered the rest of her family and then himself when she was just as small kid. But then, I’m not a horror film character.

Be it as it may, on their way to the villa, the characters encounter a little girl hunted by your typical group of enraged villagers threatening her with farm implements. On Rasti’s insistence – the rest of the group seems surprisingly okay with the idea to leave a little kid to the tender mercies of a group of what they can only assume to be violent maniacs – they rescue the little girl and bring her with them to the villa. Lily, as she seems to be called, looks a bit scratched and beaten up and seems to have lost at least a part of her memory. Rasti and she bond rather quickly, but as increasingly strange and destructive occurrences demonstrate, the girl’s not exactly alone. A certain Arumi seems to have adopted her, protecting her from threats true and perceived and showing a rather cruel and murderous streak. Need I mention that Arumi isn’t exactly human?

It has been quite some time since I’ve seen a contemporary Indonesian horror film I have enjoyed. Most of the handful of genre films that make their way to these shores from Indonesia include a heavy dose of humour that just doesn’t work for me at all, be it for my lack of cultural understanding, the inability of middling subtitles to express many subtleties of humour, or just the way the humour always seems built to undermine the horror. I have no idea how representative this is for the genre output of the country as a whole, of course. I can, however, happily report that Nayato Fio Nuala’s Arumi doesn’t contain a single scene of slapstick contortions, and instead takes its characters and their situation seriously, always at least striving for an atmosphere of horror and mystery.

This atmosphere doesn’t always quite come together – at times, the clearly very low budget results in very flat cinematography, and the not terribly great acting (as far as I can tell in a language I don’t speak) isn’t always good for preserving the finer points of the script. However, there’s also a lot of good in the film. Even though the various sequences of supernatural threat are only original to a point – turns out Indonesian forest spirits act rather similarly to demons and poltergeists in US films – Nuala does hit the right tone in them more often than not, milking the basic creepiness of Arumi’s modus operandi quite effectively, even though he sometimes uses technically relatively crude methods to get there.


The script is straightforward but not so straightforward as not to make some changes to standard formulas. So, despite being set up like a typical spam in a cabin film, Arumi doesn’t actually operate like one, and isn’t killing off the characters one after the other. Instead, it sets up a story and climax that thrives on the parallels between what happened to Rasti and her family fifteen years ago, and what is happening in the house now. The supernatural entity at work does what ghosts and ghoulies all over the world love so much, setting up the present so that it repeats a dreadful past, and probably neither for the first nor the last time. There’s an interesting, folk tale like twist to the ending, too, when Rasti’s compassion and kindness save her life, yet still leave her in a bad enough situation to call the ending grim.