Pengabdi Setan (2017): The Family Skeletons

Never let it be said that I’m stubborn about the movies I watch. I’m stubborn about plenty of other things, but not that. Awhile back I watched an old Indonesian horror film called Pengabdi Setan (Satan’s Slave) and yeah it was crude, kind of clumsy and downright goofy in spots, but it had a real energy to it, a wild-eyed earnestness that got it over the rough spots. Good shit. Well, it came to my attention that someone did a remake of it in 2017, and before I checked that out, I watched one of the director’s later films, Impetigore, which I wrote about last week. I was…disappointed. It was visually impressive but the story was repetitive, sort of obvious, and it didn’t take long to squander any goodwill the impressive opening garnered. And that took the remake of Satan’s Slave off my to-watch list.

But here’s the thing - I have a few friends whose tastes in film I trust, and one of them had really good things to say about the remake and…even more unusual…even better things to say about its sequel. So I’ve got a remake…made by someone whose other work didn’t do it for me…that also includes a sequel. That’s kind of a hat trick of Things That Make Me Not Want To Watch Movies.

But, I gotta say, this particular person doesn’t miss often in my estimation, and as it turns out, the 2017 remake of Pengabdi Setan (Satan’s Slave) is actually pretty damn good.

It’s 1981, and out in the Indonesian countryside, there’s a family going through a tough time. Bahri and his wife Mawarni live with Bahri’s mother, and with their four children - Rini, Tony, Bondi, and Ian. Mawarni used to make a good living as a pop singer, but three years ago she was struck by a mysterious illness that’s left her bedridden, frail, and barely able to speak. Money’s extremely tight because the royalty checks from Mawarni’s albums are drying up, and the medical bills do not pay themselves. There’s a lot to do - make sure the younger kids are fed and off to school, look after Bahri’s mother, and attend to Mawarni’s  needs, listening for the bell that she rings when she needs something.

And when, after a particularly restless night, Mawarni finally passes away, it’s very sad, but it’s also a form of closure. The waiting’s over, and now the grief can begin. Bahri leaves for the city, to arrange for new sources of income. This leaves Rini, the oldest, in charge of the house. And that’s when it all starts - Bondi starts acting strangely, figures walking through the graveyard that backs up to the family house…

…and, in the middle of the night, the sound of a bell.

I don’t unilaterally dislike remakes - I do think they can be lazy attempts to capitalize on nostalgia, and ones that are shot-for-shot identical seem pointless to me. But this ends up working as an interesting riff on the original - one that keeps the same basic structure, but remixes it enough that it isn’t entirely predictable. Roles are shuffled around, events are recontextualized, and the result is very different from the original without being unrecognizable or even unfamiliar. It’s basically the same story told through two different zeitgeists, and that makes all the difference. The original was broad and intense, with all the subtlety of an emergency siren. It was a story about how you have to say your prayers or the monsters will come, damn near close to a morality tale. It was almost an after-school special with ghosts and zombies. This is a much less didactic film, one that makes the circumstances of this family’s misfortune less cut and dried, and religion doesn’t necessarily save the day this time around. There’s also a bigger focus on the relationship between all of the different family members, and though it’s not the master class on dysfunction and secret-keeping that Hereditary is, there’s definitely some overlap along those lines. A mother dies, and what she took with her to the grave is going to come back to haunt everyone. It’s the story of a family sticking together in the face of adversity, at the mercy of forces that have been aligning against them out there in the dark.

It’s also a much more subtle film. It does a really good line in spooky, creepy, classic ghost-story ambience, and though the beats are nothing especially novel, they’re executed well and don’t rely on quiet-quiet-quiet-quiet-BANG! jump scares. This is a film with lots of shrouded figures in windows and doorways, shots where there’s nothing in the room until there is, and even when it’s pretty clear how it’s going to go down, it uses that familiarity to create the anticipation that the inevitable payoff needs to get under our skin . Most of the film takes place in the family home, which is old, run-down, kind of grungy, with lots of corners and long hallways and not a lot of light. It manages to be sprawling and claustrophobic at the same time, and since a lot of it takes place at night, in the dark, there really isn’t a point when it feels like a safe place to be. The use of sound is also really important here - small things like the ringing of a bell, knocking on doors, old Indonesian pop music, all of it heralds something bad, and I like how much atmosphere and tension the film gets out of relatively minimal gestures like that. It’s not really a gory film (with one relatively brief but vivid exception), and the effects work is significantly better than the original. That’s not a high bar to clear by any means, but it means the sharpest moments hit like they should. It doesn’t have the raw, gonzo energy of the original and I do miss that, but the overall result is a much consistently better film, one that does a nice job of maintaining a steady simmer of tension throughout.

I do have a couple of complaints, though. The translation is a little lacking, as is so often the case, but the feeling still shines through. It’s also a much more involved story than the original, expanding the family and the people around them, and though I appreciate the moments of revelation, I think some of them were maybe a little rushed and didn’t have quite the impact they needed. This was most notable at the very end, which provided a nice twist and nod to the original, but the execution felt a little abrupt, so something that should have landed like a bombshell instead sort of blew past the viewer in a rush to set up the sequel. But, I have to say, based on how well this worked, I’m actually sort of curious about the sequel, and I never say that. I get the sense that family secrets aren’t that easily outrun.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon