The Queen of Black Magic (2019)

Original title: Ratu Ilmu Hitam

A group of people who grew up together in a country orphanage, and grew as close as birth family there, mostly coupling up with their foster siblings, too, gathers back there to say a last goodbye to the apparently beloved orphanage boss Bandi (Yayu Unru). The new batch of kids is away on a bus tour over the weekend, so it seems like a good time for a reunion.

And a reunion it certainly is: the dark secrets haunting the lives of the grown-up orphans come back in a more literally form of haunting, and soon, ghosts and ghoulies appear, and half of the cast loses their minds in various very unpleasant ways. A nested series of dark secrets is revealed, and sins of the past have to be paid off in gory and very unappetizing ways.

Kimo Stamboel’s Queen of Black Magic (written by the redoubtable Joko Anwar) is only nominally a remake of the classic Suzzanna vehicle, using some elements of the older film but really being its own thing, the nostalgia relegated to the end credits. Hilariously enough, part of that nostalgia is a still shot of a bowl of maggots and worms, but then, once you’ve gotten through the scenes of centipede horror the film at hand features (enough of it you might also sell it as a remake of Centipede Horror), you might feel nostalgic towards that bowl too.

But really, centipedes, (self-)mutilation and all kinds of increasingly insane gory fun (and “fun) until the climax goes for a veritable hell on Earth of the grotesque are quite a ways away when the movie starts. Stamboel spends the first half of the running time carefully establishing character relations and those parts of their shared past the characters admit to, even among each other, effectively suggesting the holes in their stories and the peculiarities in their behaviours without outright explaining them or pointing them out.

So when the supernatural violence begins to explode, it’s really a very traditional, as well as as very effective way to confront the characters with the lies and secrets of their pasts while drenching them in blood and bodily fluids. It’s not one of those highly moralizing films where nasty people get what they deserve, though. Rather, there are degrees to everyone’s guilt, Stamboel making pretty clear that, as terrible as some of the things some of the characters did were, there were quite a few extenuating circumstances, and the traumas inflicted on them in their childhoods were price enough for anyone to pay for any sin. Behind the gore, there’s some clear knowledge of the way abuse can twist its victims into accomplices of their abusers, leaving behind minefields of guilt, and silent quotidian horrors.

And it’s not as if the supernatural vengeance were in any way, shape or form interested in punishing anyone in appropriate ways. Indeed, the film makes a point of the perpetrator of the vengeance being so warped by their own pain and trauma, she simply doesn’t care if she hurt or kills innocents not even born when the initial incidents took place; it’s not so much about vengeance anymore, but a wish to perpetuate the pain inflicted on oneself. Again, Stamboel works quite a few truths about the true horrors of abuse into his little fest of nasty visuals. In fact, one might argue that all the blood, mutilation, child death and centipedes are Stamboel’s way to ease the bitter pills about abuse he has to offer down our throats a bit more easily, the icky bits actually making it possible to watch what amounts to a tragedy about cycles of abuse.