No offense to Indonesians, but I feel we have reached some sort of plateau with movie technology when a horror film from there is indistinguishable in that regard from similar fare produced by one of the larger independent studios in the US, UK or anywhere else that seems to dominate the movie market. Such is the case with 2021’s Death Knot.
This is a film that looks great. Also to its credit, it has a relaxed pace that is well-suited to this kind of atmospheric work. This is a film with room to breathe, which I appreciated.
Hari (Cornelio Sunny, who also directed) and Eka (Widika Sidmore) are siblings who have a distant relationship with their mother. One night, both siblings have the same dream of their mother hanging herself in the woods after saying, “Do not come here”. The next day, they discover she really has hung herself.
Together with Eka’s husband Adi (Morgan Oey), they go to where mom lived, which is deep in the countryside. There are very few mourners, as the villagers largely regarded the deceased as a witch. They are also hostile to the trio who have arrived to settle her estate. They are especially confused as to what to do with her house.
Both the mother and her brother (Rukman Rosadi) had inherited the house, though she was the only one who lived there. The uncle is on the side of the villagers and is anxious for this “cursed place” to be gone for good: “Your mother made a pact with the devil.”
Hari is torn. He wants to keep the house in the family, as it is all they have left of their mother. Eka wants to sell it, saying she’s trying to keep good memories of their mother, but finds that harder to do the longer they’re in the house. Adi is an affable guy, who is flexible with whatever the others want to do, and characters like that tend to not fare well in horror movies.
This picture has a tinge of folk horror to it. The villagers believe witchy mom would summon a “fire red ball like a falling star” annually, which would make the locals start hanging themselves. This recurring event is creepily described as “the harvest”, and it was believed the souls of the newly dead gave the witch her powers.
The build-up to all-out horror is gradual, really starting with Hari pursuing into the woods a boy who had been staring into the house. Coming to a small, primitive idol deep in the woods, the boy demands Hari worship him. When Hari takes a hard pass on that, the spirit possesses Adi (of course). The brother-in-law starts saying such perfectly normal things as “smiling is good for humans”. I’m patiently waiting for the first time I see this on a t-shirt or bumper sticker.
Unfortunately, Death Knot will fail to stick the landing. It becomes far too conventional in its ending, or make that “endings”. One major sin it commits is it doesn’t know when to end, and there were at least three points where I thought the credits would start rolling, only for it to keep going. It’s a shame such an intriguing film could lose its way at the end, but it was beguiling up until that point.
Dir: Cornelio Sunny
Starring Cornelio Sunny, Widika Sidmore, Morgan Oey
Watched on Well Go (a company name that never stops cracking me up) blu-ray