Director: Rocky Soraya
Year: 2017
Country: Indonesia
Alternate Titles: N/A
Genre: Supernatural
Plot:
Following a terrible tragedy, a woman and her husband try to move past the event by having their friend over to help calm their nerves, but after a ritual, they inadvertently summon a savage spirit that begins targeting them for revenge and must rely on a supernatural specialist to save them.
Review:
Overall, this proved to be a worthy follow-up effort. One of the more enjoyable elements of the film is to provide more of the franchises' penchant for numerous action scenes and supernatural encounters. This gets off to a smashing start with the opening battle with the spirited-inhabited family for a rather enjoyable exorcism attempt before realizing the true nature of the possessed girl and the race to get home to stop the chilling action taking place. This frantic opening sets up some of the later supernatural antics with the doll appearing around the house or the disembodied voices leading her to dangerous locations, a great twist on the typical ploy of having the voices become the source of the scares.
There's also the rather enjoyable amount of supernatural action within the final half. The start of their troubles when she's at the center of the hauntings brings about some tense moments due to the twisted use of their childish game. There's some fun with the discovery of the notes left around the house or the doll showing up in weird places that building up rather nicely and with a diversion to an island resort that carries on the games leading to the outright chilling encounter at the pool these all set up for the final half. Detailing the body-hopping possession, chases and some outright brutal antics all throughout the house, this near hour-long series of bloody brawls, brutal beatings and supernatural action as the kind of high-energy flair needed to be highly enjoyable.
Another big factor for the film is the fine storytelling here, building a nicely layered setup. The death of the child at the fifteen-minute mark gives this one the perfect launching pod to spiral her out into a grieving mother overcome with guilt. Her frayed nature and jangled nerves mean the perfect tipping point between her appearing as a real encounter or not as this wisely chooses to turn the scares into situations that can make her look crazy. Almost every supernatural attack can easily be written off as the byproduct of her grief-riddled subconscious playing tricks, constantly claiming the doll is there when nothing shows up or freaking out over nothing. This ends up creating an intriguing viewpoint on grief and depression as these events bolster her guilt that caused all the great action throughout the finale. These end up being enough to hold up the film over its flaws.
There are a few issues here. The biggest factor is an overlong finale that draws the film out by offering several storylines that don't need to be included. The entire cheating husband angle to explain the dolls' attitude towards him means nothing due to having no build-up at all and supposedly hinted at with a flashback we were never around for it to begin with. As well, the whole setpiece revealing the duplicity is entirely cliched with the housesitter's constant claims of doing it solely to win him away from his wife causes more eye-rolling than anything and doesn't drive any kind of sympathy towards her. The cliche antics in the rest of the film are a real problem, with killers that don't die from traditionally mortal wounds, ghosts that pop up out of nowhere or possessing the innocent to seek their revenge. These issues are what hold this one back.
Overview: ****/5
While there are some overall fun aspects to this one, some of the flaws might be more damaging and detrimental as those are big enough problems that it can significantly affect the film if those are important elements. Heed caution if those factors do hold a film down, but for those that aren't mindful of such issues then give this a shot especially for fans of the previous entry in the series.
This review was originally published on Asian Movie Pulse and is gratefully reprinted with their cooperation.
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