The Queen of Black Magic

Three men travel with their families to the orphanage where they grew up. They had lived there years ago and are visiting the old director, who is now ill. The building is far off, in the forest, and the road is bad. Night falls and there is no getting out. Then things begin to happen in the house: sounds, insects and injuries that cannot be explained. There is something the three men experienced at the orphanage and do not speak of. The narrative opens it slowly. Kimo Stamboel directs. The screenplay is by Joko Anwar. It is an Indonesian production. The film is a remake of a 1981 Indonesian production; the original is considered a cult film in the country and this version changes the story entirely. The matter the narrative builds is the cost of something done in the past; the supernatural strand works as an order of revenge. Its violence is explicit and bodily; the narrative builds fear largely through disgust. Indonesian horror has come forward in international circulation in recent years and this film is one example of that wave. The setting is a single building and the narrative never goes outside; the enclosure is the source of the tension. Its limit is the script; there are many characters and some strands close without explanation. Who it is for: viewers who like Asian horror and hard genre films. Who it is not for: the violence is very explicit, some scenes are hard to bear, and the narrative is predictable.