Director: Joko Anwar
Year: 2019
Country: Indonesia
Alternate Titles: Perempuan Tanah Jahanam
Genre: Supernatural
Plot:
Following a strange attack at work, a woman finds a link to her long-lost home and decides to take her best friend to visit the village to find out more, only to discover the village's under a curse that prevents children from being born with skin and her family being responsible causing them to flee while they try to lift it.
Review:
This was an incredibly fun and enjoyable effort. Among the best features here is the truly engrossing and engaging mystery that arises throughout the first half regarding the mysterious need to revisit her ancestral home. Working off the thrilling opening where she gets attacked and barely survives the encounter with the machete-wielding maniac, the resulting desire to learn about the incident allows her to uncover the village she didn’t know she grew up in and why she would want to go back is a nice bit of work here. That this works into the main storyline present involving the use of folklore and black magic to tie the connections together with the family curse coming to pass and focusing on that aspect with their lack of knowledge regarding the way the village works.
With that setup in place, there’s some great work here with the supernatural sequences. The discovery of the note inside the leg wound which is fresh several days later is a nice idea to get the idea planted that something’s wrong, the eerie bus ride into the village in the middle of the night which is unsettling without any overt jump-scares or attacks and the two arriving at the remote village where they’re forced to stay in the decrepit mansion offers plenty of great suspense and unease as the start of this one begins to unravel. Even the mini-attempts at haunted house-styled fake-outs work well here when it’s all revealed to be a false scare of either one of them or the faulty situation of the house to explain it away just adds to the tension created throughout the first half of this one.
Once this early work is established, the film gets really enjoyable once the ruse has been set up. After the punishment handed out to her friend when the villagers learn of their true identity and nature of being there, the idea of the barbaric treatment they’re doling out on her in order to receive blessings for their own sake offers up a far greater and deadly threat. The flashback about the origins of the village curse and how it remains in effect, causing the villagers to form a mob looking to skin her alive in order to reverse the effect it’s had is impressive, much like the series of chases and encounters throughout the woods where she tries to escape the mob which are intercut with the scenes of the original ritual starting the curse. These provide plenty of action and some brutal sequences, giving this one a lot to like.
There are a few areas that hold this one back. Among the biggest flaws is the rather confusing nature of how they plan to carry out a ruse around the village pretending to be someone else. The initial attack proves that they’re completely aware of who she is and what they’re after her for so the idea of continuing to do so is pretty nonsensical, especially once they completely drop the pretenses of doing so almost immediately after being questioned about it The other factor here is the cliched notion of the entire backstory getting filled out in flashback, as we get not one but two to explain everything wrong in the village and how to stop it, and while it’s necessary due to the triggers to cause them to end up making this overlong and unnecessary. Otherwise, there isn’t much else wrong here.
Overview: ****.5/5
With a chilling narrative, an engrossing mystery to carry that out, and some brutal action that takes an old-school idea into a more modern mindset, there’s not much wrong with this one as the good makes this one of the strongest genre efforts in the style. Give this a look if you’re a fan of the genre, appreciate Asian horror in general, or looking for a modern throwback genre effort while only those who don’t enjoy this style should heed caution.
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