When Yuli was a child, she watched in horror as her mom was possessed by an spiritual force before killing her father. Parentless, she was treated as an outsider, a bastard. Twenty years have passed, and she is now a servant to Laras and her family, but she is still considered an outcast.
Constantly scorned and insulted by their grandmother, even beaten by Laras, Yuli can only hold back the anger and grief for so long. When one humiliation too many occurs, she goes to a hermit who practises black magic. She intends to put a curse on the Laras clan, from the youngest to the oldest, top to bottom. Yuli wants all of them to die. Horribly.
The hermit instructs her to dig up the fresh corpse of the Laras' ancestress and offer it as a sacrifice in a dark and disturbing ritual. Every time someone dies, she has to go back to the body and perform the ritual again. This must be completed before the body is too decomposed.
Fantasia award-winning director Hadrah Daeng Ratu and screenwriter Lele Laila have put together a nasty piece of work, a story about scorn and revenge, legacy lies, and a whole lot of faith, particularly anchored on Laras’s daughter, Tika (a star-turning role from Kawai Labiba), the most devout Muslim in the family.
No stranger to the horror genre, Ratu showed no fear in the amount of blood and gore they brought to Laila’s story. From the prologue with Yuli’s mother and father, to each family member’s death, and beyond, anyone within Yuli’s orbit runs the risk of experiencing a spectacular death.
There was a fearless and creative approach to the kills. Entertainment was to be found in the deaths of the family and those who crossed Yuli, with a lot of focus on the area of the head of this one; a challenge to male intelligence, perhaps, as the males who were killed off were not particularly bright until their ultimate demise. The corpse mutilation was particularly nasty - it needed to be, it was black magic - as the body decomposed along. Disgust was found in the ritual. There was nothing to delight in about that.
Of course, being a horror film from the Southeast Asian region, there were more than enough hairy ghost moments throughout the movie. In your face, and in the background, the haunting of the family kicks off the events of the curse. They are what we come to expect from movies in that region, and Ratu did not disappoint us. A more than ample amount of jump scares awaits horror fans in this one.
A deeply spiritual film as well, the Muslim faith, the most prominent faith in Indonesia, was well represented here. We cannot recall hearing this many prayers uttered in any other movie during one scene, let alone the entire film. We might have memorized a couple of them solely based on their repetition. Faith plays an important role in anyone’s protection from Yuli’s curse, and it gives Tika a place to find shelter (virtually and literally - get her out of the house!) as she tries to make sense of all the deaths happening to her family.
There was also delight in watching Yuli (Yunita Siregar stands out as well in the tortured role) work their way through the family, to watch her grow in confidence and determination as the curse happens. It is on purpose. We shouldn’t because hey, revenge and lots of head trauma, but the way that she was first treated by Laras and her family permits us to cheer her along. We get to watch her transform from a lowly housekeeper to an alluring seductress (Hell, we would risk it too) until the madness of it all eventually takes over. Because the lesson still has to be learned, when it comes to revenge, dig two graves.
The Book of Sijjin and Illiyyin turned out to be a particularly nasty piece of work about consequences and revenge, with an equal share of spiritual scares and physical harm. Worth a watch and should be on the radar of anyone who is a fan of horror movies from Indonesia and the Southeast Asia region.