Do You See What I See

The fact that "Do You See What I See" was an Asian horror movie that I had neither seen nor heard about, was actually more than sufficient to make me opt to watch it. I do have a thing for Asian cinema and horror cinema, so this was a given.

Writers Lele Laila and Mizter Popo put together a fair enough script. It was, however, somewhat on the generic and bland side. I sort of semi-zoned out about halfway through the movie, because there wasn't a whole lot scary stuff going on, and the pacing of the narrative was rather sluggish. "Do You See What I See" feels like it is a background noise type of movie, provided you can understand spoken Indonesian, of course.

I was not familiar with the cast in the movie, but the acting performances were certainly fair enough.

Visually, then director Awi Suryadi certain managed to make an atmospheric movie by using lighting, or lack thereof mostly to be honest, locations and such. It was not a movie that really incorporated a lot of special effects, though. I really do like the corpse effects, though.

Watchable, sure, but "Do You See What I See" was hardly a memorable foray into the Indonesian horror cinema. There are far better and way more scary Indonesian horror movies out there.

My rating of "Do You See What I See" lands on a five out of ten stars.

The story about a woman who is dating a ghost is interesting, whether using the perspective of the woman, or her friends. The movie uses her friends perspective, so we can see some interesting things like when her friends suspecting whether her boyfriend is a good man or not, or whether her boyfriend is human or not. And of course when her friends are haunted by the ghost. It's an interesting story and surprisingly well executed. However, I think this film needs to deepen the story, especially in the cause of the core incident to add more scary element to the film. Also, the main character's acting still feels a bit stiff. Lastly, I am very satisfied with the ending chosen.

After that, it resorted to the SOS different day routine of having the protagonists doing utterly asinine and stupid stuff for no apparent reason.

The psychic had already laid out what needed to be done, yet we have to watch various acts of gross stupidity. Plus I still don't get the idea of turtle walking as a means of building suspense. Or it could be a means of padding the run time, but either way I find it extremely annoying.

Another pet peeve would be characters who cannot communicate, stand around looking stupid staring at each other instead of telling the other person what's going on. Sure in the moment of fright one would imagine shock holding a person's tongue in place.

It just that every movie uses the same dumb recipe, that takes the predictability facture to a whole new level. The only redeeming factor left would be the end, so it wasn't the usual cheese fest happy ending.

Good for a onetime viewing, but I cannot see this as something I would ever watch again.

Mawar turns 20 and along with her best friends visits her parents' grave on her birthday. She feels lonely and yearns for a boyfriend to love her for who she is. In the graveyard, she chooses a boyfriend as her birthday wish and Mawar is granted that wish. Soon she starts behaving oddly as she starts giving more priority to her mysterious boyfriend Restu, which concerns her best friends and it doesn't take much time to realize, who this mysterious Restu is. Will they be able to save her friend from the toxic relationship she has got herself into, forms rest of the story.

This is one film which I treated mostly as a horror-comedy and it worked better that way for me, rather taking it seriously. More than the main character, the friends characters were more impactful. There are a couple of scenes involving the demon which is pulled off well. Though the film starts with a glimpse of a mysterious man digging a grave, the director circles back to it only in the penultimate scene only. Until then, the story revolved mostly among the girls with the stakes not too high considering the savior they turn to is another friend. The reveal in the end was predictable but as a film it definitely was a decent one time watch.

Adapting a short 30 minute-ish audio only podcast into an over 90 minute full feature film is not an easy feat for sure. However I was pleasantly surprised by how good this movie really was initially. It started out strong and I really like how they were able to still make the movie so creepy & tense despite we who have already listened to the podcast kinda got the gist of what will happen next already. Unfortunately the way they dragged the movie in the latter act kinda bogged down the whole movie altogether. But this was in no way a deal breaker as overall the movie was still really worth a watch, even just to witness Diandra Agatha's shift from the innocent naive Mawar to a much more sinister version of herself.