"Sumala" (2024)
Just Another Indonesian Devil Baby...
Not all good recent Indonesian horror movies have cool posters…but this one does.
Hello, hello. There’s some good news on the near horizon. For starters, a movie program that I’ve been dreaming about for a couple of years now is a big step closer to being placed here in Brooklyn. And for seconds, I might soon be able to announce the next book, an offer for which is said to be imminent. (Sadly, it’s not that other book, which has been announced in a couple of outlets recently…beyond that I can’t say much) Only good vibes here in the virtual fallout shelter!
No new news or published work since the last newsletter though; I don’t even have a new music playlist for you yet, though I will next time. I’d still be remiss if I didn’t encourage unpaid subscribers to become paid subscribers. A free movie (or movies?) will mailed to anyone who signs up for a paid subscription. $5 a month isn’t much and if you think it is then good luck to you, too. It’s likely as much fun for me to pass the cup as it is for you to pass it on.
And on that note, here I am on this past week’s source of fascination, the 2024 Indonesian horror movie Sumala, which is now on Netflix.
Another fine, representative poster…
Two hapless kids get ripped apart by a creepy ghost child at the start of Sumala, a conventional, but very satisfying Indonesian devil baby pic. Their murderer looks like they shrank Karen Black’s version of the Zuni fetish doll and then made her up to look like Bill Skarsgard’s Pennywise. That’s Makayla Rose Hilli, whose broad performance is fairly representative of the movie at large. Big sudsy melodrama, big blunt swings at socially critical meaning (wait, is this about child abuse??), and yeah, big top-this gore throughout. Limbs cut off, guts spilled, children and parents eviscerated…Sumala doesn’t really do modest.
Sumala also doesn’t strike me as the kind of movie that will get much praise or circulation beyond anyone who’s not already looking out for new Indonesian horror movies. It’s not by a big auteur director or even an unsung craftsman. More like a solid programmer featuring the sort of earthy, gut-munching pleasures that a lot of jaded horror buffs talk about in the past tense.
Sorry for the throat-clearing tangent, but I’m often irritated by the inflexible high/low divide in English-language writing about this type of non-English language genre cinema. The first is for horror geeks, so it’s usually written with a gee-whiz sort of breathlessness. The second is for academics, who often forget to tell you what it’s like to watch the movies they’re ostensibly about. The mediator between fanboys and academics must be critics, I guess…
And in HD, no less!
Sumala often feels like a compendium of inherited tropes and trend-entrenched cliches. This is the soapy tale of a principled, but snotty rich guy (Darius Sinathrya) who won’t sell his land, but will threaten his barren, sobbing wife (Luna Maya) if she doesn’t give him an heir. She panics and makes a deal with a sketchy local witch (Sri Yatun): have two babies, one of which will be Satan’s child, and raise both until they’re 10 years old. At that point, the devil’s daughter will be taken off the rich family’s hands and all will be well.
Unfortunately, Sinathrya’s character is something of a wild card—don’t tell him what he can and can’t do!—and he winds up swording the wrong kid as soon it’s born. So Kumala, the good daughter, gets possessed by Sumala, the bad, and winds up killing a bunch of people along the way.
The curse of going along to get along hovers around the edges of this straight-ahead killer kid pic. Sinathrya’s proud papa ultimately pays a hefty price for the generational trauma he passes along to his wife and then to his kid. That’s kind of an interesting, if largely under-developed thought given how little time is spent breaking down or even focusing on his character. Instead, we trail after Hilli, who walks with a bad hunch and a hooked arm, like she’s preparing to sweep a Dwight Frye contest. Kumala’s grotesque appearance and wracked body language make her a target for some local boys, who preen and laugh immodestly when they seem to have the upper hand. They inevitably die in great anguish and showers of computer-generated blood. Kumala also makes a point of showing her father that she’s not just her tics, though I won’t say much more than that here.
One more poster, because why not?
The kid’s parents are to blame, as you might imagine. Mom’s too weak to tame the Devil and dad’s too stubborn to see what’s in his face until it’s far too late. That’s not new or surprising for an Indonesian horror movie where Satan gets summoned and then disobeyed for generic reasons that, uh, call out society’s pressing concerns…somehow…?
I dunno, on the one hand it’s interesting to see this movie call out the biggest problem with Sinathrya’s behavior. Culturally acceptable forms of violence generally don’t need to be explicitly labeled as either patriarchal or cyclical for them to be taken as such. On the other hand, it’s hard to imagine that a movie that’s so effect-driven has much more on its mind than any old-fashioned exploitation pic might.
There’s something wrong with Kumala and it’s not going away until whatever’s rotten in her runs its course. In the meantime, several bodies pile up despite the considerable hand-wringing of the family’s well-intentioned nanny (Ivonne Dahler). Any loftier intentions read like superficial adjustments to a formula that Sumala’s filmmakers execute faithfully and with consummate bad taste (get down from that cross, kid, we need the wood!).
I’m still happy to call your attention to Sumala for a number of reasons, chief among them that it is a gross hoot. One reason among many that I’m convinced that Richard Brody’s the best working film critic is his commitment to the idea that the high/low culture divide is bullshit. Mass culture has the same capacity to be artful as fringe art does, and the same is true of arthouse and genre cinema. I mainly find it hard to take when genre cinema is presumed to be much better or worse because it’s either about something or just a low-down genre movie.
Sumala’s never going to be confused for a serious-minded horror movie, but its gestures at a serious-enough theme do stand out. It’s also fun to watch people die violently at the hands of yet another Indonesian devil baby. Sumala’s not unpretentius or unfussy, nor is it too good to be what it is, and that—all of that—is not nothing.