Jailangkung 2 (2018)

Warning: I’ll have to spoil some elements of the first movie in the synopsis!

One might have thought that following the grand finale of the first Jailangkung, ghosties and ghoulies would leave our protagonist family alone for a while at least. Alas, it’s not to be, for there are more than a few troubles coming up only shortly after the end of the first film. As it happens, Bella (still Amanda Rawles) and Rama (still Jefri Nichol) are the only characters who are not actively troubled by something supernatural or psychological at the beginning of this sequel. Bella’s father Ferdi (Lukman Sardi) is still pining after his dead wife rather badly, and has now added quite a bit of guilt for the pain his attempts at coping with his grief via magic have caused his daughters to his hang-ups; on the outside, he’s trying to pretend everything’s alright now to a truly unhealthy degree.

That’s a rather minor problem by the family’s standards now, though, for Bella’s sister Angel (Hannah Al Rashid) is more and more drawn to the mysterious (and clearly evil) insta-baby she gave birth to in a graveyard in the last movie. It’s not taking long, and she’s full on obsessed with the need to protect it from everyone, particularly her own family, with newfound poltergeist style superpowers. Because that’s not enough supernatural trouble for one family, little sister Tasya (Gabriella Quinlyn) – who was mostly a plot device in the first film – is also still missing her mother, and ghostly voices as well as the family tendency to do stupid shit suggest to her that she might use Jailangkung to talk to her. Which, obviously, is not going to turn out well.

In the end, it’s up to Bella and Rama, and a not at all suspicious new student acquaintance of theirs named Bram (Naufal Samudra Weichert), to solve the increasing amount of supernatural troubles hounding them and their loved ones.

Though we also get a couple of scenes with a medium (Ratna Riantiarno) called in by Ferdi, who’ll end up having a magical special effects duel with a flying mantianak. The Warrens never get up to stuff this awesome. Which, of course, only goes to show that returning directing duo Rizal Mantovani and Jose Poernomo do understand well that a sequel needs to escalate things in an audience pleasing manner, and proceed to do just that here.

The Conjuring movies do come to my mind for a reason here, for, while divided by cultural specifics and budgets, both movie series do tend to eschew exploring interesting thematical or character depth, and really go for a mix of horror set pieces and melodramatics to keep their audiences hooked. Jailangkung 2 works very well for me in that regard, thanks to a series of pretty great set pieces (and a complete lack of boring Evangelical Christian demons) that really do climax on a pretty weird and awesome sequence involving our protagonist family, some black magic touting bad guys, our main monster, said medium/exorcist character, a lot of shouting, camera shaking, and peculiar monster fighting techniques.

On the way there, the directors include some very fun other set pieces. A personal favourite starts with a female shape in the background exactly and very creepily mirroring Bella’s movements in an empty and dark gas station, escalating from unease about a bizarre situation into a chase involving more than one spirit. Later on, we also get the rolling heads of dead Dutch colonialists menacing our characters in a lighthouse, with no Jaka Sembung around to kick them away.

It’s all very good fun in a high end haunted house ride manner. For my tastes even more so than the first movie was, because Jailangkung 2 also escalates the weirdness of the supernatural menaces, and if a film is not aiming for serious character work, weirder is usually better in horror. It certainly is here.