The thing about horror is that it’s an intensely personal preference. Some people really like a movie while others find it, well, meh. When the nights begin to lengthen you get lots of curated lists (I’ve never been asked to do any, but I’m working on one anyway) suggesting October viewing. One such list that a friend sent me appealed to me because it was for movies on Netflix. Since that’s one of the few streaming services to which I have access, it makes the movies seem free. This particular list recommended May the Devil Take You, a 2018 movie from Indonesia. The almost polite title suggests it wasn’t named in English. In any case, I didn’t really find this one particularly scary and in part that was because of the apparent incongruity of the culture and the monster. I knew that Indonesia was a highly Muslim majority country, and I know Islam also recognizes the Devil. Still, Satanism feels kind of out of place here.
The story isn’t terribly deep: a man makes a deal with the Devil, through one of his dark concubines, to become rich, in exchange for the souls of his family. His wife is the first to go, but he remarries a retired actress who has three children, two young adult. His only biological child, from his first marriage, Alfie, feels herself estranged. (It’s unclear to me whether the youngest daughter of the second wife was also biologically his, but it seems so.) When the father falls into a serious, undiagnosed illness, the children, and actress, all converge on the house where the pact was made. Of course they open the basement door—locked and with warnings posted—where the Devil’s concubine waits. The actress becomes possessed and the two older daughters, Alfie and her stepsister, try to fight it off, only to have the stepsister become possessed. She kills her brother and intends to kill Alfie and her own young sister as well, but the latter two manage to overcome her.
The plot is a bit convoluted but the basic story is maybe too familiar—make a deal with the Devil and all Hell will break loose. I also wonder if some of the lack of real impact here comes from the subscript translation. I don’t know how this is done, but I suspect it’s not dissimilar from Google translate. That may be fine for academic purposes, but it does seem to lead to stilted dialog among a group of twenty-somethings trying to fight the Devil in Indonesia. My personal October list is more moody. Seasonal. And by no means complete. The only way to find the movies, it seems, is trial and error via curated lists.