Do You See What I See

Recently I started watching indonesian horror movies and they are really good!! This is movie is based on a podcast and it is really hard to make a movie based on a podcast so a big salute for that! And talking about overall movie technically than the I loved the lighting and cinematography of the movie the way they have shot the movie in low lighting and giving the realistic experience to the audience. The camera angles was best I really enjoyed watching the movie. Sound plays a important role in horror movie and the makers of this film has done a great job in the sound part too... Really nice work!!

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.

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.

In relation to how most horror movies are rated on IMDB, I would have expected this movie to have an average rating between 6 and 7. Its a well made solid movie. The only issue is that it can get slow at times but overally keeps a decent pace with plenty of actual horror scenes which are quite scary and creepy. There are so many much slower and boring horror movies rated higher than this. This is actually an entertaining movie. Characters and their interactions are quite realistic and believable as well and each actor has done justice with their respective characters. Story is not too deep or complicated but it serves its purpose. All the special and visual effects were also done well for the most part. I am not a big fan of how the movie ended though. But that is a highly subjective take, some will probably like the ending.

In the end, its a decent one time watch movie for horror fans who want to watch a movie which is a straight up horror movie and NOT some metaphorical movie about trauma. Casual fans might find some scenes to be too scary though. Indonesia has become World's Horror movie capital in my opinion and this movie just adds to that.

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.