KKN di Desa Penari (2022)

A group of Indonesian university students on the KKN-part of their academic life come to a village out in the middle of nowhere to develop a new water source for the place. While somewhat eccentric and certainly beholden to some beliefs rather confusing to our city folk protagonists, the villagers are for once in a film like this friendly enough and seem to genuinely care for the young people’s safety and health. Since the village is rather spirit-haunted, this does result in helpful rules like “don’t enter that part of the forest, it doesn’t belong to us”, but what are young people to do when they hear gamelan music from there? Or when a female jinn (Aulia Sarah) makes offers they simply can’t refuse?

Awi Suryadi’s KKN di Desa Penari was apparently a huge blockbuster hit in Indonesia, even bigger than the director’s Danur movies. The story is based on a “true Internet story”, which I read as “serial creepypasta” by somebody going by the handle of simpleman. Lacking completely in Indonesian, I couldn’t say how close it sticks to its source, though the film’s somewhat episodic structure seems typical for the kind of thing it adapts. Eventually, most of the curious experiences our students have are tied together with the big threat and/or the spirit protecting our Muslim final girl Nur (Tissa Biani), but two thirds of the film are a bit too loose for my tastes, more held together by Suryadi’s experienced and capable hand for creepy – but not too creepy – set pieces than by any kind of narrative drive.

Part of the problem there is how long Desa Penari is, with more than two hours runtime that include two epilogues and a triple dose of crying; a bit of judicious cutting down of repetition and the lesser of the spooky set pieces would probably have been a considerable improvement. Which is not to say this isn’t a good, sometimes even great, bit of contemporary Indonesian horror, but a tighter focus and this would have been an actual masterpiece.

Even so, there is a lot to like here, beginning with Suryadi’s eschewing of jump scares for longer, lingering suspense scenes that often end in some wonderfully creepy imagery. The first Gamelan dancer possession, for example, feels particularly eerie because the director gives it room to breathe, visually exploring it instead of throwing it away as a quick shock. Which also opens up room for a handful of very cool possession sequences the young actresses can throw themselves into, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned in my horror watching life, it is that young actresses really seem to love doing this sort of stuff.

As an admirer of folk horror, I’m also very happy with the decision to not make the villagers evil cultist, but rather a group of people who have learned to live with the supernatural forces surrounding them, having found a way to live and let live with malevolent things that are still an inescapable part of their world. Of course, they are not terribly competent at protecting their guests. As the film portrays it, that’s in part thanks to the divide between town and country beliefs which makes it impossible to actually explain what’s going on before it is too late. In part, because our young people do tend to “sin” – like all of Suryadi’s films, this is a bit more on the socially conservative side than the more brutal style of Indonesian horror – and in part because supernatural forces of this kind which are also natural forces can’t truly be contained by us mere humans. Even the god(s) of your choice can have problems there.

Speaking of folk horror, the mix of jinn and spirit beliefs, including the beliefs of the local pagan (is that the right word for the Muslim part of the world?) past, and the way they intersect with Muslim folkloric (more than religious) ideas is particularly fascinating here, suggesting a comparable dialectic as existed between Christian and pagan belief structures but playing out with less of a drive to violently suppress the old ways. So there’s quite a lot of interesting stuff going on in this particular crowd pleaser, despite my issues with its pacing.