★★½☆☆
Kimo Stamboel’s latest film, Janur Ireng, recently played at Fantastic Fest. A prequel horror story that works as a standalone film, I went in completely blind to the franchise and was still able to follow along.
Written by Stamboel, Simpleman, and Khalid Kashogi, the film follows Sabdo and Intan, a brother and sister who lost everything when the house they inherited from their parents burned down under strange circumstances. This forces them to move in with an uncle they have never met.
The story’s outline is pretty simplistic and straightforward. From the opening sequence, there is a supernatural element to the film, and the rich, long-lost uncle bit of comes off as suspicious and odd from the get-go.
All the characters are rather generic and lack individuality, feeling more like stock characters than fresh, original characters with any depth or personality. That is something even more crucial given the subgenre of horror the film falls into.
“A less fun and more ritualistic Ready or Not.”
The result is a mismatched film in tone and execution, which hinders the pacing and overall enjoyment.
Stamboel’s direction is one of the film’s biggest problems. The film lacks the vision and execution needed to fully embrace the style and subgenre it is trying to inhabit.
Supernatural horror isn’t the subgenre in question. It’s ritualistic horror. Almost half of all horror films have some kind of supernatural or unrealistic element to them. Yet the ritualistic, cult, and satanic angle is where the film stands out and has an opportunity to captivate. It falls short due to a lack of clear vision, which bleeds out like the goat, spreading across all aspects of the film.
Patrick Tashadian’s cinematography is the clearest example of this. While, on the surface, the shots and execution are well done, they offer a visual layout that creates a crisp and clean-looking film.
Which is part of the problem. It’s crisp, clean, and soulless. The camerawork showcases the layout of a generic drama, offering no real insight into the genre or the story at hand.
“It’s crisp, clean, and soulless.”
Horror films thrive on accurate cinematography that creates unease and uncertainty. When shot like a run-of-the-mill drama, the film loses its luster and feels bland. The Strangers remake is the perfect example of this. The original had a loose, handheld style. One felt bland, while the other felt gritty and uneasy.
Here, there are no defining moments that separate the horror from the rest of the film. The balance between the supernatural and the natural order of things isn’t smooth or transcendent.
Paired with Ricky Lionardi’s score, which does fall more in line with the genre, it still feels generic and copy-and-paste rather than original and crafted for the moment.
In the scene where they’re leaving their burned-down home at the beginning of the film, the score is creepy and eerie, but it feels like something out of a background-noise track on Instagram rather than an original piece of composed music.
In that case, more would have been less. Horror films are historically known for having smaller budgets and fewer resources, which is why certain aspects, such as cheaper effects, are forgivable. But when it comes to the score, less is more, and copy-and-paste scores don’t apply.
With the performances being decent and the story having an interesting concept that slowly gets better as the film goes on, by the third act, it becomes interesting and semi-engaging.
“By the third act, the film becomes interesting and semi-engaging, but it arrives there too late to fully recover.”
Making Janur Ireng a decent enough horror flick without being something stellar, particularly well crafted, or a film I would feel the need to seek out.
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