Original title: Ikut Aku ke Neraka
Warning: I’m going to get a bit spoilerish here
Lita (Clara Bernadeth) and her husband Rama (Rendy Kjaernett) are expecting their first child in a quietly happy way. But following the move to a new home, strange supernatural things begin to occur, clearly centred around (and very much against) Lita. At first, Rama doesn’t believe there’s something more going on than Lita suffering from the perfectly normal stress of the last trimester of pregnancy. Though he is coping with it in a somewhat less patronizing way than many horror movie hubbies, he’s still a fat load of no help to his wife, who has to cope with a jump scare prone dead lady all on her lonesome. Until the entity visits Rama in his car, that is – after that, things escalate quickly towards not actually that helpful spiritualists and dark backstories.
Azhar Kinoi Lubis’s Follow Me to Hell is one of the lesser entries into the contemporary Indonesian horror boom, lacking the blood, the brilliance and the very dark imagination of the best of its peers. Middling as it is, this is still a perfectly decent little movie, with at least a handful of excellent creep-out moments sandwiched in between the more generic and bland ones. I am particularly fond of a really cool sequence where Lita’s mirror image starts to act rather disturbingly (including some mugging towards the camera) in an effectively creepy manner. Even better, this will turn out to be a meaningful hint towards the haunting’s back story rather than just random spookery, suggesting some thought having been put into why the supernatural villain acts how she does in the spooky scenes.
There’s also the (late) abortion of a ghost child to get somewhat disturbed by and some delightfully complicated mythology to wrap one’s head around.
It’s too bad that the film can’t ever quite seem to hold the effect of its best moments, tending to a certain professional blandness when it really needs more mood building and/or more characterization.
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