Pengabdi Setan: Say Your Prayers

Sometimes - not often, but sometimes - the films I watch for this thing work in spite of themselves. On paper, they should suck. Hell, on film, they should suck. But there will be something about some of these films that just gets them over. Usually it’s a full-on commitment to whatever they’ve got going on, no matter how ridiculous. Films that just go for it often make it easier for me to get past their bigger flaws.

And Pengabdi Setan (Satan’s Slave) is a perfect example of this kind of movie. It’s dated, crude, and unsubtle to the point of being hokey but damned if it doesn’t have its moments. It tells the story it’s going to tell with an earnestness that made it easy for me to overlook some very obvious shortcomings.

We open on a funeral. Munarto has just lost his wife Mawarti to some unspecified illness, leaving behind him, their son Tomi, their daughter Rita, and their faithful servant Karto. She’s being laid to rest in the family plot, and many have come out to mourn her, including one mysterious woman who stands off to the side, watching the family. They return home to grieve and begin the process of getting on with their lives. Only Tomi is visited in the middle of the night by a specter, a ghoulish distortion of his mother, who scratches at the window and terrifies him. He says nothing about this to the rest of his family, but when he tells a friend about it, his friend advises him to seek out a fortune teller, who can give him advice about spirits. And so he does, and the fortune teller tells him that his family is in great danger. She tells him the best way to protect himself and his family is through the use of black magic.

So Tomi picks up some books and starts chanting and meditating on the dark arts. This upsets Karto greatly, because he’s a devout man who thinks Tomi should spend his time praying and sending blessings to his later mother. Meanwhile, Munarto recognizes that Karto, as faithful as he is, is also ailing. So they’re going to need some help around the house. He’s a prosperous businessman, so he has the resources to hire a housekeeper. And days later their new housekeeper, Darminah, shows up at the front door, ready to move in and start work.

She’s the woman from the funeral.

So we’ve got a restless spirit, a kid practicing black magic, and a mysterious figure who seems to be up to no good. That’s plenty, and one thing I’ll say about this film is that it isn’t convoluted or overly fussy. Bad shit happens and keeps happening. That’s the brief (well, for the most part, but more on that later). It’s not especially cerebral or sophisticated, and in fact, everything about this film is unsubtle or even downright crude. The acting is melodramatic, the dialogue is stiff throughout (even allowing for the vagaries of translation), and the special effects are primitive even for the time in which it was made. But for all of that, its crudeness also gives it a real kick in places - not as consistently as I’d like, but there are definitely some really striking moments and set pieces here. The color palette is largely shades of garish, and the soundtrack is full of ambient swells and feedback and cavernous booms that seem more like industrial noise than a soundtrack, and the crudeness of the effects and makeup work give it an unsettling outsider feel. At its best, it taps into the same kind of gonzo strangeness that made Messiah Of Evil so good, though never to the deliriously nightmarish heights of that film. And for every moment that doesn’t really work (there’s a nightmare sequence that’s downright comical), there are more that do. There are some jarring tonal shifts that just add to the overall weirdness as well - moments that feel like they were spliced in from a movie about the lives of swingin’ teens in 1980s Indonesia, before the whole thing returns to a feeling of nightmare.

That’s at its best, though. Sometimes the flaws are harder to overlook. In terms of pacing it feels like it drags in the middle, and it’s marred by a few instances of characters completely forgetting or disregarding something inexplicable that occurred right in front of them - not so much like they’re in denial as like a reset button got hit or something. There’s a, well, let’s say casual relationship to continuity here. There are creepy moments sporadically throughout the beginning but the tension gets lost for a bit, and though the climax does a lot to make up for that, again there are some moments in the heat of things that come across as maybe a little sillier than the filmmakers intended. And the whole thing ends with a moral that blows right by subtext into the territory of flat-out text, one laid on so thick and with such a heavy hand that it sort of comes all the way back around to being almost endearing and nostalgic, like a callback to an even earlier age of filmmaking, where all kinds of sensationalism could be excused if you ended on a note that was edifying to the masses.

And that’s the interesting thing about this film for me - it only succeeds sporadically, stumbles a fair amount, and falls flat on its face at times. But I was on board for the ride because there’s something about its operatic earnestness and utter lack of nuance that I think sort of works for it. If it reminds me of anything, it’s of a fable - an instructional story intended to teach a moral lesson, and fables aren’t really about nuance. Say your prayers, this film says, or the monsters will get you. And there’s something kind of appealing about something that unpolished.

IMDB entry
Available on Tubi