SEBELUM IBLIS MENJEMPUT AYAT 2: A Disappointing Sequel with Gory Flair and Ambitious Ideas

Genre: Horror 

Produced by: Wicky V. Olindo, Timo Tjahjanto      

Directed by: Timo Tjahjanto    

Written by: Timo Tjahjanto 

Production Company: Screenplay Films   

Starring: Chelsea Islan, Baskara Mahendra, Widika Sidmore, Hadijah Shahab, Lutesha, Arya Vasco, Aurelie Moeremans, Karina Salim, Shareefa Danish

Runtime: 110 minutes

SYNOPSIS: 

Alfie (Chelsea Islan) and her stepsister Nara (Hadijah Shahab) are the only survivors of a deadly supernatural encounter that killed many of their family members two years ago. As they try to move on with their lives, they are continuously haunted by the memories of that one fateful night. Their trauma grows ever more intense, eventually leading them back to where they were. To settle things once and for all, they must come together and confront a greater threat, who has just been summoned from the dead to drag their souls into hell. 

REVIEW:      

                                                             

Despite already having a successful filmmaking career spanning over a decade, it is Timo Tjahjanto’s more recent work Sebelum Iblis Menjemput (2018) that stands out as his most auspicious achievement to date for one specific reason. It is the first movie that Timo has directed without the help of his trusted comrade Kimo Stamboel, who, as the Mo Brothers, has contributed to such cult classics as Rumah Dara (2009), Killers (2014) and Headshot (2016). Judging by the fact that the movie itself had been critically well received by many local filmgoers and its director being spoken in the same breath as legendary horror filmmaker Sam Raimi, he has done alright on his own thus far. 

And it also made some money along the way. Right around a million eyes bear witness to Timo’s directorial debut during its theatrical run, hitting that magic number by the skin of its teeth to fulfill the Indonesia movie industry’s standards of a box office hit. Soon, words got out on the street, influencing giant streaming service Netflix to swoop in and acquire the worldwide rights to the movie. It was then made available for public consumption all over the globe on November 15^th, 2018, four months after its release date of July 31^st in Indonesian cinemas, where the international response is just as enthusiastic. 

Two years later, Timo finally comes back to his old stomping ground with its sequel, fittingly titled Sebelum Iblis Menjemput Ayat 2. And he’s as heavily involved creatively in the making of this movie as its predecessor, evident from his name being credited once again as its sole screenwriter and director. Without spoiling anything from the previous movie, most of the original cast though is out of the picture, save for its lead actress Chelsea Islan and her young co-star Hadijah Shahab, both of whom reprise their roles as Alfie and Nara respectively. That is not to say the replacements are bad. Its supporting cast is stacked with talents across the board, whether it’s seasoned actresses like Karina Salim and Shareefa Danish or up-and-comers like Lutesha and Arya Vasco. 

And Sebelum Iblis Menjemput Ayat 2 is, by Indonesian horror sequel standards, an ambitious undertaking, one that occasionally succeeds in staying true to the frenetic, balls-to-the-wall spirit of its predecessor while also turning the dial up to eleven and even beyond. The whole thing plays out like an elaborate Rube Goldberg-style haunted house genre contraption, a rollercoaster ride that takes the viewers for a wild, dizzying spin into its nightmarish vision. The movie benefits greatly from Timo’s deep affection and knowledge for the material, which is not too surprising since he is the one who invented it in the first place. He loves fleshing out the mythology so much that he goes all out, injecting a healthy dose of propulsive energy to help maintain its headlong pace. 

But the main attraction in Sebelum Iblis Menjemput Ayat 2 is Timo’s grindhouse gore sensibilities, and in that, it delivers in spades. The movie is a relentless exercise in bloodletting that more than earns the R-rating. His undeniable commitment to his craft is palpable in every frame, often letting his camera linger longer than most local horror filmmakers do to portray such carnage in graphic detail and up close and personal, to delightfully queasy, stomach-churning effect. 

At the same time, there’s a sense of artistic value to the gross-out horror. Buckets of blood and guts continuously rain on its characters’ parade in such painterly fashion almost all the kills and fatal blows they suffer are tantamount to an artist sweeping red brushstrokes on a blank canvas. For that reason, its level of brutality transcends gratuity and becomes a feast for the eyes, which is highlighted in possibly one of the movie’s most breathtaking scenes that’s kind of a cabin in the woods variant to the famous chest-burster sequence in Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) where an imposing demonic figure crawls its way out of a person’s belly. 

Moreover, Sebelum Iblis Menjemput Ayat 2 fairly balances such slasher excesses with glimpses of remarkable restraint. Much of its first act is a series of chilling set-pieces that relies on unyielding silence and tension for shock factor, whether it’s when Dewi (Aurelie Moeremans) is terrorized by a demonic spirit who is silhouetted eerily in a foggy window upon visiting her friend Gadis (Widika Sidmore)’ apartment or another scene with an entirely different location and different character (but it’s heavily advertised on the trailer) when Alfie, struggling to catch some sleep and inconvenienced by the ominous voices in her head, starts flicking the light on and off over and over again until something scary materializes behind her within touching distance. Nearly every type of scares it has in its locker works thanks to the painstaking choreography and impeccable timing.

Sebelum Iblis Menjemput Ayat 2 also stands apart from other Indonesian horror movies because of its refreshing perspective on the genre’s mythology. By including the ancient biblical deity Moloch as its big bad, the movie offers a Christian slant that is rarely explored in a field dominated by Islamic ghost stories. Such creative choice fits with the franchise’s horror-fantasy conceit of a demonic spirit who descends upon a haunted house and feed on teenagers as a form of sacrifice. 

From a technical standpoint, Sebelum Iblis Menjemput Ayat 2 is a handsomely mounted production. The creature design on display is first-rate, made more impressive by the near-seamless manner in which the movie combines practical effects with CGI. Their appearances inspire an assorted kind of terrifying, ranging from the grotesque to the more ethereal, and they all add to the richness of its world-building. 

Replacing cinematographer Batara Goempar Siagian from the first movie, Gunnar Nimpuno sticks to its low budget, Evil Dead-esque roots, meaning quite a lot of those manic POV handheld shots to suggest the wild, uncontrollable presence of an unseen demon. And this sequel has one that rivals the POV demon who attacked Alfie’s step-family members two years ago, where the camera rushes from the basement underneath the floorboard, up the ladder, through the opening and culminating with it slamming straight into its victim’s face. But then there are times when Nimpuno holds back on his chaotic impulses by moving his camera in a slower, more deliberate fashion to create a gradual build in suspense. 

Set primarily in an old-fashioned haunted house, the movie’s environment is bleak, gloomy and forbidding. The color palette is a grungy hue of blood red and muddy black that emphasizes the macabre reality of Timo’s quasi-fantasy realm. Antonius Boedy’s brilliant set design pulls the double duty of constructing a labyrinth-like structure that’s small enough to consistently trap the protagonists in tight situations and confined spaces as well as big enough for the demonic spirits to roam around freely. 

Unfortunately though, those visual flourishes don’t add up to much in the end, proving true yet again the law of diminishing returns in regards to sequels. Sebelum Iblis Menjemput Ayat 2 sinks under the weight of a sloppy screenplay that tries desperately to have its cake and eat it too by picking up the story from where the 2018 movie left off while also telling a new one that seem completely out of left field, as if certain parts of the script are taken from the script of an unproduced stand-alone project and haphazardly repurposed to be the next installment of a big franchise. And the end result of Timo’s indecisiveness over what his movie exactly is about leads to a frustrating hodgepodge of half-baked ideas that never quite come together. 

Not even Alfie’s status as its lead heroine in this series can distract from the underlying fact that she is awkwardly shoehorned into a sequel where, after only two movies in, she has already overstayed her welcome. There are one or two tacky revelations that are the closest thing it has to a connective tissue between this movie and its predecessor. Beyond that, Sebelum Iblis Menjemput Ayat 2 is one of those unnecessary epilogues for a character that already had a perfect ending to begin with, which is evident from her near-nonexistent arc. She remains a stagnant character for the majority of the movie, one who acts as merely an empty vessel waiting for someone else to fill in key information through expository dialogue as supernatural things unfold right before her eyes. 

And the script does a disservice to Alfie’s character development by keeping her motivation almost largely impersonal, the most obvious of which involves turning her into a messianic heroine who is kind of forced to help five young kids fight a villainous figure who, like her biological father Lesmana in the first movie, are tied to these kids’ past, deceased and is now resurrected as a demonic entity. It’s a decision that not only comes across as retreading familiar territory but also implausible because this time around, her journey hinges very heavily on all-too-convenient coincidences and obvious plot contrivances. 

Furthermore, Alfie is much tougher to sympathize with here because she’s such an irritating, mean-spirited caricature of the compelling, defiant young woman she was in the first movie. Timo makes the major error of mistaking her defiance for uncontrollably snapping at everyone on sight, encapsulated in the many scenes where other characters attempt to have a friendly talk or apologize to her and she responds by either physical aggression or shouting at their faces. Granted, in one scene, she was handcuffed to a bed but the problem is she reacts the same way almost all the time, regardless of the situation. Her human dimension gets lost in this animal-like rage that tests the viewers’ patience the longer the movie goes. 

Similarly lost in the shuffle is Alfie’s relationship with her stepsister Nara, a dangling plot thread from the first movie that’s left dangling for long stretches of its runtime and then resolved rather abruptly. Timo appears unsure of what to do with this particular thread, as it’s brought up only briefly and later quickly discarded whenever he’s bored with it. It doesn’t help that these characters rarely interact with each other, even going so far as to separate them, during much of the movie’s second act. Very little time is spent actually delving into their relationship, which renders her herculean effort at doing whatever is necessary to protect Nara from demonic harm as a metaphor for the strength of their sisterhood heavy-handed. The movie instead spends too much time dabbling in her dire soap opera romance with one of the new characters Budi (Baskara Mahendra) and this eventually goes nowhere. 

Speaking of the new characters, it’s cluttered with too many of them and the fact that they are as thinly-sketched as those sinful dead teenagers in slasher movies (which this movie technically is) make matters even worse. Sebelum Iblis Menjemput Ayat 2 falls back into the same cliché that riddles many horror sequels, where the characters are nothing more than disposable genre archetypes, reduced to a single defining trait like the nerd, the jock, the rebel, the final girl’s supportive love interest, the cynic and so on and so forth. They exist purely to blatantly explain the plot out loud, help pile up the body counts or, at one moment in its narrative, play a part in an accidental kidnapping, the latter of which make them hard to root for as the movie’s protagonists, regardless of their emotional motivation. 

It’s as if Timo is banking on the audience to dislike these new characters in order for some of their eventual deaths (it’s a horror movie, after all) to feel much more deserved. His gross mishandling of these characters can be seen as soon as their arcs began with them breaking into Alfie’s apartment wearing ski masks and rifling through her things like a burglar. Once they got caught red-handed, the next turn of event is rather icky as they start tasering Alfie down and drugging Nara, which leads to them lying unconscious in the back of their car. Firstly, just the notion of these college kids being capable of performing a burglary with the proper equipment and skill strains credulity to the limit. Secondly, the aforementioned action is so vile and unforgivable it makes them no different to the demons coming after them. 

Sebelum Iblis Menjemput Ayat 2 hews too slavishly to the script of the recent remake of Ratu Ilmu Hitam (2019), which was coincidentally directed by Timo’s friend Kimo Stamboel, to the point that it cannot help but invite unflattering comparison. Every bit of story beats from Joko Anwar’s script have been reproduced with little to no variation, from the new characters’ status as orphans, the haunted orphanage storyline and even down to its third act twist. 

 

Like the third act of every blockbuster horror movie, Sebelum Iblis Menjemput Ayat 2 devolves into an endless barrage of meaningless jump scares. This entire sequence is the horror movie equivalent of watching a Michael Bay-level mind-numbing, mindless mayhem, in which it sacrifices the near-sustained suspense of its first act in favor of wall-to-wall noises. Beyond that, on a storytelling standpoint, the third act somehow decides to backtrack on easily one of its most radical, Tony Stark snap moment in the narrative and, in the process, lessening the impact of a specific character’s arc. 

On the acting front, it is strictly mediocre, which is a shame since some of the names involved have been much better in other projects. That is not to say they’re bad. Timo has got a cast of predominantly young actors at his disposal, all of whom meet the rigorous demands of the movie’s intricate and extensive horror stunt work. Occasionally they manage to elevate their paper-thin characters to the best of their capabilities. But their effort can only go so far. With practically nothing but plot-driven dialogue to work with, they too often crumble during the more dramatic scenes.  Nearly every line is delivered in a staid, stilted manner, as if they’re reading from a teleprompter. 

Reprising the role of Alfie from the first movie, Chelsea Islan is surprisingly inconsistent. Islan oozes more than enough scowling, street-tough charisma to look and act like a badass, butt-kicking broad. What’s missing from her second outing is the nuance. She’s been poorly directed into shouting every line out loud any time she’s interacting with other actors, in which she can be grating at times. Meanwhile, another returnee Hadijah Shahab plays the role of Alfie’s stepsister Nara with the sort of doe-eyed childlike innocence that garners its viewers’ sympathy in an instant. She is given almost nothing to do sadly when all hell breaks loose. 

Interestingly though, it’s one of the franchise’s latest additions Widika Sidmore who puts in a scene-stealing turn as one of the orphans Gadis, a young woman with a tragic past. Sidmore is such an engaging screen presence, combining human vulnerability with slightly inhumane darkness to add more credibility and heft to the character’s psychological struggle than what is on the page. Lutesha makes every second of her all-too-brief appearance as Kristi, the cynic amongst the orphan characters, worthwhile. She’s all snark and sarcasm during the opening exchange, but for the rest of it, she’s convincingly transformed into a real bundle of fierce energy and physicality. 

Baskara Mahendra, for his part, does a serviceable job with the bare material at hand. As Alfie’s love interest Budi and the kindest amongst the orphan characters, he plays it just by-the book, as if he’s been held back by the limitations of his given archetype. Arya Vasco is mostly and sometimes annoyingly one note as the hot-headed jock archetype Leo. Karina Salim lends some gravitas to the character of Marta, the nerd amongst the orphan characters, even if it is too often underutilized. Shareefa Danish, renowned for being Indonesian’s foremost scream queen, is wasted as Jenar, reduced to being the mouthpiece for Timo’s mythologizing. 

CONCLUSION: 

Sebelum Iblis Menjemput Ayat 2 boasts Timo Tjahjanto’s signature gory flair, fine performances from its cast and a few interesting additions to the mythology, but the confusing plot, lackluster characters and repetitive scares amounts to a disappointing sequel. 

Score: 5.5/10