Satan’s Slaves: Communion
A storm approaching the isolated high-rise tower standing along on a flood plain just outside of Jakarta, the families who live there were sold on the idea of a community – “call out and anyone will hear you!” – but inside the apartments are tiny and overcrowded, the surfaces unfinished, the central atrium a gloomy, oppressive space and for those unable to climb stairs the upper floors can only be reached by unreliable elevators, the Mandara Apartments unfit for purpose.
Recovering from the horror which saw them lose both their mother and youngest brother, the Suwono family have relocated to the fourteen-storey building, father Bahri and his three surviving children Rini, Toni and Bondi crowded into a tiny one-bedroom dwelling on the eighth floor; given an opportunity to further her education and career Rini plans to leave for the city, but already tragedy is upon them again, a terrible accident in the building and the rising waters of the storm making it impossible for anyone to leave.
The first Indonesian film to have been produced and released in the IMAX format, Satan’s Slaves (Pengabdi Setan): Communion is written and directed by Joko Anwar, a sequel to his 2017 original which followed the Suwono family in their village, itself based on Sisworo Gautama Putra’s 1980 original of ghosts, demons, faith and the undead of the same name, never widely distributed in the west.
Expecting the viewer to have awareness of the events depicted in the 2017 release, despite the two-hour running time the characters and their relationships are barely introduced and little connection between events is apparent, Anwar focusing more on the repressive and confining atmosphere than a smoothly flowing narrative, though in some ways the very incomprehensibility makes the film more unsettling, expressing themes of fear of change and the clash of the traditional and the modern.
Set in April 1984, twenty-nine years after the discovery of a mass exhumation of graves shown in the prelude, despite journalist Budiman Syailendra (Egi Fedly) having investigated that incident and a previous one in 1926 he only sets out to the Mandara Apartments the day before the anniversary, arriving too late to prevent a recurrence but instead offering a post-mortem explanation of the intent and actions of the followers of Raminom somewhat akin to the unprompted “Force ghost” scene of Revenge of the Sith.
Largely told through the eyes of a bunch of perky mop-haired kids exploring the darkness of the cavernous block with conveniently powerful torches, at times Satan’s Slaves: Communion feels more like Stranger Things given a cultural twist with more than a slight debt to Poltergeist and its second sequel, overly dependent on the same repeated lights on/lights off jump scare and needlessly introducing new characters in the final scene to establish that a third chapter is likely to be summoned, the continuation of the franchise tomorrow more important than coherence today.
Satan’s Slaves: Communion is available on Shudder now
