Living with ghost kids isn’t as easy as it sounds, and Danur main series heroine Risa (still Prilly Latuconsina) is beginning to feel a bit exasperated by her spirit companions. Methinks it can’t help that it’s not just one or two ghost kids, but five…
Anyway, after a couple of somewhat problematic ghostly events at a birthday party for Risa’s boyfriend Dimas (Rizky Nazar), our heroine has enough of that ghost kid bullshit, and begins wishing she could just close her third eye and be done with ghosts, haunts, haints, and all other spookery. One sunny day, a mysterious woman appears and fulfils Risa’s wish. To nobody’s surprise, Risa’s new inability to see any ghosts is not terribly helpful once some really creepy stuff begins happening to our heroine.
As always based on “a bestselling novel” by Risa Saraswati (whaitaminute…), this entry into the Danurverse (Saraswativerse?) is yet another fun bit of Indonesian spookery. Again directed by Awi Suryadi, it’s in turns a bit too sentimental (child ghosts do tend to bring that out in movies), genuinely creepy, a bit generic (where the genre in question is “Indonesian ghost movie, non-gory department”), and very enjoyable.
Plotting and writing can come over a mite naïve at times, but it’s not the naivety of filmmakers who aren’t terribly clever but one that consciously chooses a less cynical view on the world to position the film at hand (and really, the whole series) in a somewhat folkloric shape of the world. Which, at least looking from my perspective, is the perfect position to take for a series that simply takes mediumship, a very active spirit world, and so on, as a given, providing the film with the possibility to treat the supernatural seriously without having to aim for that most dreaded of things, “realism”.
Apart from this, most of what I’ve written about the other two mainline Danur movies is still true here: Suryadi is a fine director of that sort of mainstream spookiness that never quite wants to get at your jugular but certainly still enjoys creeping you out and making you jump, and he’s very adept at creating the proper surrounding mood for all his different kind of scares to work. In this regard, I was particularly happy with the film’s use of water as an agent of evil and gate for evil in form of a never-ending, pretty hefty, and highly localized rain (kudos to the sound designer there as well), which turns the house Risa and her sister Riri (Sandrinna Michelle) live in into a liminal space where all kinds of spooky things can – and indeed do – happen quite a bit more effectively than they otherwise would.
Latuconsina still makes a likeable heroine and usually even sells the too sweet moments between her and Dimas well enough for them not to become too eyeroll-inducing (this is, after all, not a film series based on deep characterisation); she’s always great when she has to be possessed, depressed, or beleaguered by stupid ghost kids. Speaking of Dimas, he’s even allowed to do something useful this time around, which does make for nice change, though he still isn’t terribly interesting.
I know I always sound a bit flippant when I write about films in this particular series, but that’s mostly because the clichés of “I see dead people” mediumistic horror don’t really carry too much weight for me. The way these films – Danur 3 is certainly no exception – turn those clichés into very fun, and sometimes rather atmospheric, horror movies, on the other hand, I find highly admirable, and usually very entertaining.
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