May the Devil Take You

Damn scary as i thought! Watched it on netflix alone and i felt it really very scary! I wished i shouldn't have been watching it alone! Alot of frightening parts! Hence its a good flick for a horror lovers! Worth giving it a try!

This movie is a Pengabdi Setan (Satan's Slave) wannabe. You can clearly see how it tried so hard mimicking the success of Satan's Slave. The plot doen't make any sense. It is jump back between the past and the present via (somehow) time traveling or memory(?). The main character suffered too many blackouts without any explanation what is wrong with her. The director decided to add "thing" that has been his passion from all his movies: blood through cheap unnecessary gory scenes.

The audience is not afraid because of the visual appearance or plot, but just "surprised". The film only shows evil characters with a creepy appearance, and only to make the audience surprised by displaying it suddenly on the screen with sound and music as loud as possible. Even the characters seem very slow in speaking.

Director Timo Tjahjanto is the man behind a couple of my favourite action films of recent years - Headshot and The Night Comes For Us - and, along with Gareth Evans, he co-directed a fun story for horror anthology V/H/S/2. Naturally, I was pumped to see May the Devil Take You, which some have described as an Indonesian The Evil Dead.

I can certainly understand the comparison - both are fast, frenetic, gory tales of possession that, for the most part, take place in an isolated rural building - but Tjahjanto's film cannot hold a candle to Sam Raimi's cult classic: although it features some well handled individual scenes, a messy, unfocussed plot makes it a confusing tale that is definitely less than the sum of its parts.

The basic plot revolves around a young woman, Alfie (Chelsea Islan), who goes to see the ailing father she hasn't seen in ten years. On discovering that he has left an old villa in her name, Alfie pays a visit to the building, where an evil presence lurks in the cellar. When her stepmother and step-siblings also turn up, the malevolent spirit is freed and, in one of the film's most effective moments, possesses the stepmother. One by one, the family members fall victim to the evil at large...

Superbly executed scenes of suspense (the girl with the hammer behind her back) rub shoulders with derivative Asian spooky nonsense (what is it with Asians and haunted hair?), while predictable scares fail to do the trick. At no point was I tempted to turn off or catch some Zzzzzs - a brisk pace ensured that - but I did find the uneven, jumbled nature of the whole thing frustrating. I certainly expected better from Tjahjanto.

This is a terrifying film. It doesn't pull its punches. It hits hard from the start. It has genuine moments of horror that is missing from most films these days that just rely on cheap jump scares with sudden loud noises and ghosts jumping from out of screen.

Having said that, it does not transcend the usual horror tropes with characters making bad mistakes and acting downright stupid at times. The brother character, in particular, is frustratingly stupid. The movie also suffers from poor acting by the child actor who just isn't convincing that she is frightened. Any human being would be terrified in the circumstances of the film but her expressions are just robotic and she does not seem to be in the same movie as the rest of the actors.

All in all I recommend this movie to all horror movie geeks a 100% but do not expect an exceptional film like the likes of Hereditary (2018) or IT (2017).