May the Devil Take You: Chapter 2 (2020)

Original title: Sebelum Iblis Menjemput: Ayat Dua

aka May the Devil Take You Too

Two years after the demonic family massacre fun of the first film, Alfie (Chelsea Islan) is keeping the mental demons of the past at bay with pills and attitude, taking care of her step sister Nara (Hidijah Shahab) despite things being exceedingly difficult emotionally, psychologically and financially for the two.

Time doesn’t get a chance to provide further healing, because a group of masked people knock them both out and kidnap them (Alfie’s putting up quite the fight, obviously). When Alfie wakes up again, she finds herself in a dilapidated former orphanage in the country. Apparently, hers and Nara’s kidnapping is the best way a group of young women and men in their twenties could come up with to ask her for help, because who’s talking to people anymore, right? You see, the group grew up together in this orphanage. Quite happily, even, until the wife of orphanage head Lesmana (Ray Sahetapy) died and he became an abusive demon worshipper planning to sacrifice them, as you do. The kids did manage to save themselves by burning him alive, but he cursed them in the process. It looks as if that curse has really begun to hit hard the last couple of months.

Fortunately, the group have found a solution to lift the curse. They just need someone who has fought off demons before to read a spell from Lesmana’s old grimoire, and the thing should be done. And who just happened to be in the news a couple of years ago with a wild story about demons? Despite everything, Alfie eventually does agree to help out the nitwits thinking a kidnapping to be the proper way to ask for help, but her reading of the spell doesn’t lift the curse, and instead starts another night of horror. Well, at least Alfie has some practice in these things now.

It is difficult not to compare May the Devil 2 to director/writer Timo Tjahjanto’s former filmmaking partner Kimo Stamboel’s sort-of remake of Queen of Black Magic. After all, they both take place in an orphanage and concern the demonic misadventures of its former abused inhabitants. However, the film at hand feels somewhat nicer (if you can use that word for something with so much gore and goop as this one has), less interested in its horrors as a metaphor for cycles of abuse and more in making something for an audience to have a loud and creepy good time with; also one with far fewer centipedes, I can happily report. There’s still some depth to the film’s treatment of traumatic childhoods and its consequences, but that’s not really its point. To my eyes, both approaches to horror are perfectly valid, and I’m happy to have two films that could have been carbon copies of each other turn out so differently.

In style and tone, this one’s, like the first May the Devil Take You - which I never wrote up for reasons lost to time and the bad memory of a middle-aged guy, but which I enjoyed quite a bit – clearly made with at least one eye on the first two Evil Dead movies. A couple of moments directly quote Raimi’s films, quite a few more simple suggest the influence, and there’s quite a bit in Tjahjanto’s wild and wildly creative camera work hinting at that influence as well. However, the director then goes and mixes these by now classic US horror film moves with monsters and concepts about devil worship very specifically Indonesian, using Raimi’s early style to tell a story the US director could never have told this exact way. It’s a great example of how an artist can use their influences to build their own thing out of them, and keeps Tjahjanto far away from any accusation of using his clearly encyclopaedic knowledge of the Western horror tradition for mere copyism. Which, don’t get me wrong, can lead to perfectly fine films too, particularly when it’s non-Western directors copying Western ones (the other way round, things often become rather embarrassing).

While I’m still comparing, I do prefer Alfie quite a bit to Ash, what with her being much less of an asshole, and actively trying to protect the people around her and not just herself. Islan’s performance manages to make her courageous in the better meaning of the word (as in, a person fighting through her fear instead of one not having any), and she’s great at suggesting how Alfie uses her rough attitude as a survival mechanism.

There are obviously some plot problems here – mainly, why don’t the idiots ask before they kidnap and why do they dump Nara in the haunted house too? – but watching May the Devil Take You 2, I found myself much more interested in the next weird transformation or bloody mess the film would come up with than poking at its script.