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“Janji Darah” embodies the stock grade of Indonesian horror, where a shaman pops up, spirits populate and the realm of the dead occupies center stage. There are no innovations in the screenplay, only an excess of bone-tired cliches that have no spark or originality. The film turns duller with each minute, the horror becomes increasingly leaden.

The CGI infusions of the demonic apparition are so ridiculous it is impossible to ascribe any seriousness of thought or alarm to the scenes designed to evoke terror. It feels increasingly sillier. The film is so bereft of fresh ideas the makers hurl every formulaic ball at the wall. It’s even lazier; there’s no attempt to flesh out the supernatural and the blurring lines between the real and otherworldly.

Characters are paper-thin, the acting wavering, and the entire narrative flaky, injecting random apparitions and amping up the supernatural with little effort and a whole lot of contrivance.

It seems that with the toning down of censorship in Indonesia, filmmakers are now free(er) to deal with issues that could not be touched before, such as female desire, the harshness of the school system and the blight of social media, through realistic approaches. The recent “Like & Share” and “Photocopier” are two of the most renowned samples, with Lucky Kuswandi's latest work, “Dear David” also moving in the same direction.

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Laras, despite being the second child of a poor family along with her brother and mother, is the student body president at an expensive private school, which she is able to attend due to a scholarship. Both the aforementioned facts (that she is poor and a straight A student) have not helped her in the school environment, with her frequently getting bullied, even more so since she is the principal,...

Dear David is a drama film directed by Lucky Kuswandi starring Shenina Cinnamon.

This high-school adolescent movie comes from Indonesia… It will not be a film that goes down in the history of movie making and doesn´t teach us anything new that we don´t already know: all over the world people make movies about teens, some have charm and others don´t.

This is one of the movies that doesn´t have any.

About the Movie Dear David (2023)

A love-struck teenage girl, in high school, more or less risqué fantasies and your diary used to be caught and now they catch your files. Nothing new under the sun on a planet Earth in which adolescents get silly, have pimples, flirt and make mistakes… and that is how the human race goes on, miraculously, based on these mistakes transformed in celluloid (or mobile phone files in this day and age) which,...