Siksa Kubur: Death Is Not The End

I made this observation a few weeks ago, but it continues to interest me how you can start to pick up on particular cultural touchstones once you’ve watched enough horror movies from a particular country or part of the world. Spain really likes demons and demonic possession as the prime mover behind its horror, Japan has its nods to animism, the importance of the family unit, and water as a symbol for the presence of the supernatural, England does a lot with ancient beliefs and pagan tradition. This doesn’t describe every film from these places, of course, but they pop up enough to seem like things particular to those places.

And I’m starting to figure out some stuff about Indonesian horror as well. It’s interesting how much of it serves as cautionary tales about what happens when you don’t live a pious life – curses that follow generations when someone violates Islamic traditions are pretty common – and just how…wacky…it is. At their best, Indonesian horror films, whatever they might lack in technical polish or savvy, have a wide-eyed earnestness to them that carries the films over rough spots, like an Islamic Chick tract. It’s very no-fucks-given, and Siksa Kubur (Grave Torture) is one of the better examples.

Sita and Adil are brother and sister, who until recently worked in their family bakery. But something terrible happened, something driven by religious fear, and now they’re orphans, taken in by an Islamic school where they are taught a trade alongside being taught how to be good Muslims. But Sita isn’t having it – it was religion that got her parents killed, stories about the torment that the impious suffer even as they lie in their graves. The soul is tortured in the afterlife, the body is tortured after burial. She’s angry and determined to believe that it wasn’t her parents sinning that got them killed – it was religion that killed them. Her teachers can’t answer her questions, they just call her a sinner for her troubles, and she doesn’t want to stay there. She grabs Adil and they head for a tunnel that’s supposed to take them off the school grounds, but it goes on a little too long, it gets a little too dark, and they meet someone there. A young boy named Ismail…

…which just happens to be the name of a former student who died under mysterious circumstances.

Probably this film’s biggest strength is the way it plays around with conventions of the genre. Normally Indonesian horror films are pretty straightforward, but this one isn’t afraid to leave the whole “protagonists have to return to some kind of cursed village to undo something terrible” story in the dust and set everything much more firmly in the modern world. It’s a story about the tension between faith and doubt, how religion is used as justification for violence, the way unresolved grief can become obsession, and the nature of morality. Which is a lot to pack in, but it doesn’t really feel forced, everything plays a role in getting the audience to the end of the story, which takes detours through revenge stories, attempts to apply scientific methods to the supernatural (an obsessed sibling out to disprove supernatural phenomena gives this some definite Oculus vibes), meditations on aging and mortality, and stories about the wealthy and powerful attempting to cheat hell. You think you know where it’s going, but there’s a real WTF-ness in how the story unfolds in some surprising directions as it goes, but without ever feeling jarring – everything emerges from what precedes it, while packing in the requisite moments of supernatural menace and a walloping dose of “say your prayers and you won’t get tortured in the afterlife” that is becoming, to me, an absolute staple of Indonesian horror films.

Another staple of Indonesian horror films is energetically janky effects work and this film is no different in that regard. In this case, though, the production values are really good otherwise so it’s a more jarring contrast than in other Indonesian films where the whole thing feels sort of grungy and so relatively primitive effects work blends right in. In a couple of places it’s especially glaring, almost comic when it shouldn’t be. Blackly comic, but still. On the other hand, there are a number of moments that do a lot with less – voices where there shouldn’t be any, little bits of creepy business in the background, an especially grisly game of hopscotch – which buy the film a fair amount of goodwill for the moments when things don’t really land. The performances are a little variable, but the actors playing Adil and Sita – as children and adults – do a really good job and keep the film feeling grounded. And even when the performances aren’t as strong as they could be, there’s a lot of raw emotion in them which gives the whole thing a feeling of intensity and genuine unease that you don’t always get in horror films. Sometimes the story feels like it’s turning on a dime but it manages to make it work in the end, especially in a third act that gets seriously weird in places – I can’t remember the last time I saw a film actually pull off nested nightmare sequences this well.

Apart from the uneven effects work, there are a couple of other problems – the end is an absolute head-scratcher, the setup for the central conceit is a little convoluted (like, that’s a lot of work and planning just to prove a point), but it manages to stay away from easy jump scares, has some nice moments of visual flair, and some surprisingly heartfelt acting that manages to elevate it above your basic ghost story and your basic Indonesian religious tract. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but it’s nice to see something a little more contemporary-feeling from this corner of the world.

IMDB entry
Available on Netflix