Suster N

Indonesian movie industry in its awakening period during the recent years have been flooded with mostly horror films, which are mostly, unfortunately, lack of originality, made in a hurry, messy editing, silly script and plot, terrible sound FX (only to shock you with loud bang), and other disadvantages mostly caused by lack of seriousness in making a film, possibly also due to the profit-crazed producers. The recent release "Suster N" provides different taste. While not scary or shock-fest, it gives something that Indonesian horror movie never provides before: suspense and mystery. The plot flows nicely, keeps the audience guessing. We have wonderful young talents here, Atiqah Hasiholan and Wulan Guritno (although doesn't talk much, her presence is already mysterious enough...), along with great cameos made by a bunch of Indonesian veteran actors and actresses like Henky Soelaiman, HIM Damsyik, Ratna Riantiarno, Jajang C. Noer, Ade Irawan, and many others. Unfortunately the male actor's acting (Ben Seven) is rather wooden. The location (a villa with Dutch colonial architecture converted into an old folks' home) is great, giving that eerie Gothic surroundings, like old-school horror movies. Setting in other "mainstream Indonesian horrors" are mostly sloppy and never arranged seriously.

However, among the good things mentioned, it's such a pity that the filmmaker rather failed to show "scary ghost" - and still can't completely release heavy dependence to "The Ring" and "Ju-On" type of ghosts, like other Indonesian horror trash movies. Anyway, I think it's just a minor thing and for me, not decreasing my enjoyment of this movie. Yes, it's a different Indonesian horror movie, and I recommend at least to watch it once and judge it by yourself.

Your typical haunted house story with no real unpredicted twist to it. Some of the scenes are actually quite good and build-up keeps you mildly interested for most of the movie.

A young couple moves into a house that used to be an old people's home. With a lot of family history they quickly get to returning the house to its former glory. Weird stuff starts happening and the wife quickly starts getting freaked out by visions an unnatural happenings... Basically the norm.

It has some nice special effects to go with it, including some intriguing shots. However the direction makes the movie feel like an supernatural episode of The Bold and the Beautiful. The movie also gets disjointed and eventually looses the plot somewhere midway. After that I was basically waiting for it to end and the suspense was non-existent from then on.

Definitely an above average movie for the Indonesian horror genre, but shows how much the country has to go in this field before it gets wider foreign audience (this excludes the incredible Joko Anwar).