Category: Foreign language - supernatural horror
Original title: Siksa Kubur
Directed by: Joko Anwar
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So recently, it was a public holiday where I am in Australia. As a film buff, I decided to whip out the ol' Netflix and see what was available. A film called Grave Torture sounds kinda interesting - supernatural splatter horror, and with an R18+ rating. This better hit hard because anything with an R18+ rating isn't (and shouldn't be) a walk in the park!
And I can only hope that it will be better than Guna Guna Istri Muda, which in reality isn't a high bar to clear.
The plot:
The movie begins with siblings Sita and Adil (Widuri Puteri and Muzakki Ramdhan) working at their parents bakery. Their parent's (played by Fachri Albar and Happy Salma) are kindly people, but business is struggling. While standing behind the counter, Adil catches the attention of a man with a serious look on his face and wearing headphones. The man walks in, hands Adil a casette tape, talks about fighting the enemies of Allah and warns him to not go outside. Sita attempts to prevent a theft of cash from the till with the parents confronting the thief outside, but they all fall victim to the man Adil encountered before who turns out to be a suicide bomber.
Back home after police questioning, the two children play the cassette and find it contains unnerving sounds of people being tortured incessantly and ending with "Man Rabbuka?" (Arabic for "Who is your Lord?"). If you're thinking this is analogous to the "screams from hell" recording that made the rounds during the 1980s, you'd be absolutely right.
Having lost both their parents, the two children are sent to a Pesantren (an Islamic boarding school in a remote village) where Sita has become quite headstrong and starts to wonder if the whole concept of punishment in the afterlife (and especially the idea of torture in the grave) was created to scare people in the here and now.
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Now, the concept of torture in the grave requires me to exposit a little bit on Sunni Islamic theology. In Sunni Islam, when a person is buried (where they're in the realm of Barzakh) they will be asked three questions by two angels named Munkar and Nakir: Who is your Lord, what is your religion and what do you say about Muhammad? The idea is then that for a righteous person, the two angels will appear as pleasant beings, the person will be able to answer the questions correctly (Allah, Islam, he was the prophet) and the grave opens to become a paradise. But for unrighteous people (unbelievers, hypocrites, etc), the two angels appear as dark, fierce and with eyes like thunder who will strike the person in the grave with hammers and the grave closes up to the point that the left and right ribs interlock. And thus we have the concept of grave tortue (in Indonesian, siksa kubur), hence the title.
Back to the movie!
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Being a strict Islamic school where teachers relish in describing Islamic afterlife torture don't take too kindly to skeptical questions, so Sita plans to run away - however, there are only two ways out: past the guards (somehow), or through a scary tunnel. Sita and Adil take the scary tunnel option. Adil makes it a little bit of the way in, but is left behind by Sita who goes much further in to the point she comes across the deformed spirit of a boy named Ismail. Sita runs back out the tunnel in absolute fright and finds Adil has been busted by the teachers.
One of the teachers takes pity on Sita and equips her to abscond, but she first needs to get Adil away from the clutches of the school benefactor, Ilham, who has a proclivity to young boys and who is somehow connected to the Ismail that Sita saw in the tunnel. Though she is unable to help her brother, afterwards the two eventually make their way along the tunnel and successfully escape.
The story then skips two decades later where Sita (Faradina Mufti) is working in a high-end nursing home and Adil (Reza Rahadian) works in a mortuary, their respective occupations giving them access to plenty of people on death's door and to graves. Sita is still obsessed with the idea of "grave torture", having kept the tape from decades ago. Sita reads that the tape was recorded by the suicide bomber at the grave of a serial killer.
At her workplace, Sita has a somewhat close relationship with Mr Wahyu (Slamet Rahardjo) who comes across as a bit eccentric, but wealthy enough to afford aforementioned high-end nursing home (despite his family's protestations). One night, Wahyu and Sita get into a heated discussion around morality and Sita reveals that she knows Wahyu is actually Ilham because Sita has managed to track him down. Wahyu takes his own life by gunshot after declaring he is unrepentant.
Having dug a grave large enough for two people, Adil hands Sita a handheld camcorder as she lies down next to Wahyu and the grave is covered up. Sita notices a couple of small things come down the pipe that is supplying her air, and a snake comes up next to Adil.
The next day, it is implied nothing scary happened, so Sita pulls a favour from one of the residents of her nursing home to get a spot on a chat show where she publicly questions religion. However, Adil had swapped the memory card from the camcorder, leading to a heated argument between the two siblings as Adil complains that Sita's obsession is going too far. Sita retorts that she has always had to be the stronger of the two throughout their lives, especially because of what happened to Adil all those years ago at the pesantren.
Back at the nursing home, Sita sees ghostly figures pop up in corners and then suddenly disappear - especially in Mr. Wahyu's room. Later that night, Sita discovers one of the other nurses, Lali, in a compromising position with Pandi which causes his wife, Nani, to kick him out of their room. Nani loses control of her bladder, and with no-one to help her she attempts to operate the faulty washing machine to wash her clothes. She achieves this, but when she goes back for her wedding ring, the washing machine catches Nani's hair and continually twists it. Eventually, not only is Nani scalped, but her face is fully degloved (one of the most hilarious effects in the movie - I had to show my wife because it was stupidly ridiculous).
Sita gets into a conversation with Mrs. Juwita, a woman who claims to hear the dead speak, so she calls Sita, Pandi and a couple of others into a séance. Juwita, with Nani's voice, tells Pandi that to earn her forgiveness, he needs to kill Lali. The séance stops suddenly when Juwita, with Adil's voice, says to help Ismail. Afterwards, poor Nani is targeted by Pandi, but ends up being stabbed by Hadi, another resident at the séance.
Adil is preparing a body for burial and takes a quick break to walk over to his locker where we see he has two memory cards labelled Wahyu - indicating that he indeed did swap them for Sita's TV appeareance. But his day is about to take a turn for the worse as the body he was preparing for burial has reanimated and ends up attacking him as he hides in his locker.
We then see that after Sita's appearance on the talk show, all the talk about grave torture has led to what might be dubbed an Islamic revival - people coming to Islam to find their faith, teens visiting graves to experience grave torture, but also numerous suicide bombers. Frustrated that Wahyu has died peacefully without any torture, Sita digs her way back into Wahyu's grave with her camcorder when suddenly the grave starts to collapse. Sita lands in a tunnel where she is confronted with numerous scenes (while also questioning if she's hallucinating due to oxygen deprivation) - her parents right before they were blown up, Adil preparing a body, and Ismail crying for help as a lecherous Wahyu approaches (doing the most stupid dance I've seen). Ismail (now looking normal) and Sita approach a hole that she needs to jump over. However she ends up falling into it which immediately takes her back to the grave alongside Wahyu - and this is where the fun starts…
Back in the grave, we see the snake from before climb down the air pipe and into the throat of Wahyu's corpse where he suddenly sits up, only for a demonic-looking figure to repeatedly smash his face in with a hammer and to be bitten by the snake - but between every blow and. bite, Wahyu's face regenerates. Covered in blood splatter and bits of Wahyu, Sita repents of her sins and begs for forgiveness from Allah. Adil, suffering from a snake bite of his own, digs up Wahyu's grave and rescues his sister right before the grave caves in. As they walk away, a demonic voice asks Sita, "Man Rabbuka?".
The screen cuts to black and we then see Nani's hand (with her distinctive wedding ring) pause a video of Wahyu in his final address saying that what happens to you in the grave will be what you fear the most.
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An interesting roller-coaster ride of a movie, and the ending is one of those ones that really needs some exploration and consideration to make sense of. The most straightforward explanation is that Sita died when she was in the grave alongside Wahyu the first time because the snake blocked her air pipe so then everything after that night was an hallucination - her going to work, her going on the TV show, the séance, Pandi's affair with Lali, the subsequent deaths and her going back into the grave - all of that was an hallucination. However, there is enough room to come up with other interpretations, particularly since right at the very end, Sita is asked who her God is, despite not being in a grave - is this an hallucination as well?
Some reviews of this movie thought of it as a yay-for-Islam movie, but given that numerous people die due to suicide bombing and that the benefactor of the school was a lecherous pervert, this is no more a yay-for-Islam movie than what The Exorcist was a yay-for-Catholicism movie or what The Offering was a yay-for-Rabbinic Judaism movie. It's a movie made using a religious framework to tell a story, and given it's set in Indonesia, Islam seems to be the perfect backdrop.
As a movie, I have to say: the first third of the movie, up until the siblings escape down the tunnel, had me thinking this was going to be in the Best In Class category. As a piece of storytelling, cinema, suspense and frights, it was perfect!
However, my run of movies with supernatural premises that either don't explain the rules well enough, or breaks the rules for the sake of the plot, continues. I get that the story had to be fleshed out, but in hindsight, the middle and the end really didn't capitalise on the excellent beginning. Implying that half the movie was an hallucination is a great way to get us wondering why did all this extraneous stuff happen - why is Sita being followed by demons in an hallucination, why are corpses killing Adil in an hallucination, why did Nani get scalped in an hallucination?
And particularly in the section I call "the tunnel of revelation" - What importance does Ismail play in Sita's life story to the point that he features so prominently, especially considering they never met? The part where the kneeling kids plead for Sita to help Ismail, Ismail pleads Sita to protect him from Wahyu (who we see climbing on the ceiling), they walk about 10 metres up the tunnel and then Ismail says "thanks for helping - I'm safe now!" then magically teleports out the scene where Wahyu charges at Sita - meaning the danger from Wahyu/Ilham is not actually over. This don't make sense. It's almost like they did the "tunnel of revelation" just for the sake of some scares.
I did like the very last part, though. Quite gruesome. The tortures inflicted on Wahyu are quite extravagant, especially with the nine snakes and what the angel does to him. The close-up of Sita drenched in corpse blood with body parts hitting her and she's screaming under camcorder light for forgiveness - that was excellent! The face regenerating between each strike added an extra layer.
The subtle hints at comedy were also appreciated. The scalping scene where Nani loses her face…I had to replay that a few times as it was hilarious! Hilarious to the point that I showed my wife, and she's definitely not a horror fan. And the opening title sequence was hilariously cut - going from the fires of hell, all of a sudden…to a bakery oven!
What would I have done differently? Part of me wanted to keep the movie set to when the two siblings were children - the two children they has to play the roles did a great job with what they had and I don't see any good reason why they couldn’t continue, except maybe some cultural (or maybe even legal) prohibition against starring children in horror movies. Like, yes, what happens to dead people is a dark topic
It's not a bad movie overall, but does ends up at only Decent.
STAR RATING: 3/5
