Asih 2 (2020)

A couple of days – at best months – after the first Asih movie, our indefatigable kuntilanak (as always, Shareefa Daanish) returns, murders the protagonists of said movie, leaving the old lady (Marini) behind to spend the rest of her life in a mental institution, and kidnaps the couple’s baby Amelia. So much for surviving a horror movie.

About six years later (so about 1991), a little girl (Anantya Rezky) is hit by a car on a jungle road and brought to hospital by the driver. Apparently, the kid lives alone in the jungle, without family or home. Hospital doctor Sylvia (Marsha Timothy) decides the little girl she soon will dub Ana needs adopting rather badly. It is clear that Ana, as well as the situation in which she was found, reminds Sylvia painfully of her own daughter and the way she died some years ago, a tragedy neither she nor her cartoonist husband Razan (Ario Bayu) have emotionally recovered from. Razan is pretty sceptical about the adoption idea, but is letting himself be convinced.

As the couple quickly realizes, Ana isn’t in the best of mental health, and isn’t exactly socially adapted to life outside of the jungle. This is of course not going to be the major problem our protagonists have to cope with, for Ana is of course little Amelia after some years as Asih’s “daughter”. Thus, the very jealous and rather dead would be mother starts on her usual diet of terror.

Which, of course is the main problem Rizal Mantovani’s Asih 2 has. This is now the third movie in the Danurverse in which Asih is the main villain, and her bag of tricks really hasn’t changed much from the early days of the franchise, so our characters are spooked and creeped out by things the film’s audience will have experienced often enough for a degree of tedium to set in. There are still decent scare scenes in here, thanks to Mantovani’s considerable talent at going through the motions with a degree of style, but hardly one of them is going to surprise or shock anyone. They do deserve an appreciative nod for competent filmmaking by the director, though.

Another obvious flaw is the amount of time the film needs to show its protagonists catching up to all the things about Asih the audience has learned during the course of her other appearances. There’s little excitement in seeing them figuring out the kuntilanak’s not exactly complex backstory, and there’s really little reason for an audience to go through it yet another time, particularly since the film adds little that changes anything of much relevance. Asih’s creepiness – and really the creepiness of most supernatural threats in the movies – is not at all enhanced by us knowing every part of her in fact sad and tragic backstory in excruciating detail, and there’s certainly no need for the film to go through the material yet again when it has no plans to use it in any interesting or new ways.

Thanks to this, Asih 2 also manages to bury its more interesting elements, namely the emotional parallel Sylvia draws between Ana/Amelia and her dead daughter, the well-drawn fog of grief that has descended on hers and Razan’s relationship and what their new little girl does to that. There’s a really interesting horror film about two grief-stricken women – one living, one dead – fighting each other for an adoptive daughter buried in here, but it is buried under the dross accrued through the very real horrors of bad franchising.

In short: Asih (2018)

1980. Eight-months pregnant Puspita (Citra Kirana), her husband Andi (Darius Sinathrya) and Andi’s mother (Marini) have moved to the country. Alas, the house belongs to the territory of the kuntinalak Asih (Shareefa Daanish), of future Danur fame, and we all know that Asih has a bit of a thing about children, even the not yet born. So the young couple is going to have to cope with some rather hefty supernatural troubles that won’t simply be resolved with the proper disposal of a placenta (though they will try that).

There’s really no reason why the Conjuring movies should have all the fun with spin-off prequels about some of their ghosts and ghoulies, particularly when the Danur-movies, from which this spins off, seem to have commercial clout in their native Indonesia comparable to the US advertorials for a couple of horrible charlatans.

Not looking at the commercial side of the business, I’m not sure the world exactly needed Awi Suryadi’s prequel to its universe’s mainline films. The Danur movies (as directed by Suryadi) themselves aren’t always the deepest horror movies, but they are consistently fun and interesting, sometimes even inventive. The first Asih isn’t quite so good. From time to time, Suryadi manages to find his usual flair for mood-building and the ability to turn clichés into a fun set-piece or two, but at least half of this not exactly long movie feels a bit too much like a creative team dragging their feet. There really isn’t enough material on screen to make for a full movie, and nothing we learn about our titular kuntilanak’s backstory changes all that much about what we know from the first Danur, making much of the film at hand simply feel rather too slight for comfort, particularly since it shows little interest in doing much with the more interesting elements about our victim family.

In short: Danur (2017)

aka Danur: I Can See Ghosts

When she was a child, Risa (Asha Kenyeri) lived with her usually absent parents in the country mansion of her grandmother. Her loneliness was disrupted by a trio of children she took some time to identify as ghosts, and apart from their encouraging her to suicide as the cure for loneliness, it really wouldn’t have needed the intervention of a priest (?) severing their bonds.

A decade or so later, the family returns to grandmother’s mansion. The parents are still usually absent, so it falls to Risa (now played by Prilly Latuconsina) to take care of her little sister Riri (Sandrinna Michelle Skornicki) as well as grandmother (Inggrid Widjanarko), who must have suffered one or more strokes and is bedridden, can’t speak, and looks generally frightened and unhappy. Any time now, there’s supposed to be a nurse coming in to help Risa out with her familial duties.

One night, a creepy woman calling herself Asih (Shareefa Daanish) appears, assuring that she is indeed the nurse and not the spirit of a woman dwelling in a banyan tree with a terrible fixation on little girls out to get Riri. Ominous things ensue.

Eventually, Risa will need to reawaken her connection to her old dead kid buddies if she wants to save her family.

If I believe the Wikipedia, Awi Suryadi’s Danur was and is the highest grossing film in the new-ish Indonesian horror boom. At least it was successful enough to spawn two sequels I’m hopefully going to get around to writing up one of these days. The film at hand is stylistically a lot softer than the May the Devil Take Yous and Queens of Black Magic of this world, standing in a continuing sub-genre of films about young women (sometimes cursed with) the ability to see and communicate with the spirit world. Often, like here, the main character has to take on a protective role not only towards innocents threatened by the supernatural but also towards a younger sibling whose own mediumistic powers are just awakening.

While still having proper hauntings that are an actual physical and spiritual threat, these films feature little gore and tend to be friendlier, sometimes more openly religious than their somewhat ruder siblings.

Danur is a good example for most of these elements. Asih – a lovely creepy turn by Daanish who does make an immense impression through strange body language and staring – may very well drag your sister to the spirit world (a place looking exactly like your house but drenched in Bava colours and a bit of dry ice fog) to drown her, but she’s not going to induce anyone to cut their face off. That’s not to say the film isn’t putting the work in to creep you out: there are some excellent scenes between Asih and the grandmother, playing on the old woman’s horrible helplessness; some clever plays with the invisibility of spirits to most people (unless they look through their own legs, apparently) and a generally carefully built mood of pleasant creepiness.

Apparently, in Indonesia, unlike other parts of the world, a horror film does not need to be a jump scare fest to be a mainstream commercial success in the cinemas.