In short: Silam (2018)

Little Baskara (Zidane Khalid) is having a very hard time. His father has died, and his mother is coping badly, treating the kid with little empathy or understanding. Things feel so bad to him, Baskara decides to run away on the day of a school outing, for some reason pinning his goodbye note to an intensely creepy looking doll he has made himself.

Because it is apparently that sort of week for the boy, a bullying incident on the outing apparently opens his sixth sense, and now he’s seeing ghosts all around him. Eventually, he makes his way to the home of his father’s twin Anton (Surya Saputra), his wife Ami (Wulan Guritno) and their weird twin girls, all of whom he hasn’t seen for years. He is welcomed very warmly indeed, but something’s clearly not right about the situation: there are no questions why he is here, or anything about his mother. The family simply takes the boy in, no questions asked, smiling very broad smiles while going through their peculiarly repetitive days. Obviously, Baskara’s ghost encounters don’t stop, either.

Repeat horror offender Jose Poernomo’s Silam isn’t one of the director’s better ones; it also isn’t exactly a highlight of Indonesia’s contemporary horror boom. The film’s structure is just too ramshackle for it to work well, its plot twist feels telegraphed (unless you are Baskara’s age), and a potentially potent emotional core is buried under quite a few clichés used inelegantly.

There are also very painfully obvious attempts at borrowing from Blumhouse style horror, with a finale scene that so clearly prays at the altar of Annabelle (but admittedly with a creepier looking doll), it becomes faintly embarrassing. The film’s borrowings from Shyamalan’s Sixth Sense work rather better, partially because Poernomo here actually does some rejiggering of tropes and give what he takes a bit of a turn of his own. Because so many Indonesian horror films use elements of that film, it has basically become a founding film of the less gory side of Indonesian horror.

There are, as is typical of Poernomo, a few rather potent horror set pieces buried under the commonplace material. The repeated family dinner may be overacted but is wonderfully weird and creepy, and who doesn’t like a ghost who apparently infects its surroundings with slow motion? Plus, it’s nice to see the twins from The Shining getting regular work.

That’s not really enough to recommend Silam as a whole, but if a viewer is in a bit of a gold digging mood and can find a way to watch the film, there is indeed something of interest to find here.