Visually, Joko Anwar employs a masterful control of silence and sound. The rural, rain-soaked setting becomes a character in itself—isolated, decaying, and oppressive. The cinematography frequently traps the characters in the frame’s corners, emphasizing their lack of agency. Yet, the true genius lies in the auditory design: the eerie whisper of the mother’s song, the metallic scrape of her fingernails, and the shocking silence that precedes a jump scare. This sensory deprivation mimics the family’s own isolation, forcing the audience to feel their helplessness as they realize that the only way to stop the Pengabdi Setan (the servants of Satan) is not to fight, but to sing—to complete the very act of vanity that damned their mother in the first place.
In the landscape of contemporary Southeast Asian cinema, few films have achieved the critical and commercial resonance of Joko Anwar’s Pengabdi Setan (2017). A loose remake of Sisworo Gautama Putra’s 1980 cult classic, Anwar’s film transcends the typical boundaries of the horror genre. It is not merely a collection of jump scares and ghostly apparitions; rather, it is a meticulously crafted tapestry of national cinematic history, post-colonial anxiety, and the fragility of faith in the face of overwhelming familial and economic trauma. Pengabdi Setan succeeds because it grounds its supernatural terror in the very real, visceral horrors of grief, poverty, and the disintegration of the family unit.
At its core, Pengabdi Setan is a narrative about the failure of the patriarch and the consequent burden placed upon the matriarch and children. The story follows the Suwono family, living in a remote house with their bedridden, formerly famous singer mother. When the mother dies, strange events begin to unfold, revealing that she had made a pact with dark forces to sustain her failing career. The father, a stoic and emotionally distant figure, is largely absent or ineffective. His inability to protect his family forces the eldest son, Rini, into a premature role as caretaker. The film brilliantly inverts the typical horror trope of the haunted house: the danger is not an external invader, but the lingering contract of a parent who chose fame and material success over spiritual safety. The terror, therefore, is inherited. It is the debt of the mother’s ambition that the children must pay, a potent allegory for the sins of the previous generation bleeding into the next.
One of the film’s most profound achievements is its role as a self-aware revival of Indonesian horror’s golden age. The original 1980 film, starring the iconic Suzzanna, is embedded in the nation’s collective memory. Anwar pays homage not through cheap imitation but through a sophisticated reconstruction. By setting the film in the 1980s—a period of economic modernity clashing with traditional mysticism—he creates an anachronistic space that feels both nostalgic and alien. The use of the original film’s haunting lullaby, along with the visual motif of the masked, shrouded Mother, serves as a bridge between past and present. This meta-cinematic layer invites audiences to remember a foundational text while simultaneously being terrified by a modern one, thus re-legitimizing folk horror as a serious artistic vehicle in Indonesia.
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