Satan's Slaves Keep Calling Me Back to the Theater

by Aero S.

2022 for movies so far has been overall good – we’ve had a lot of amazing original films like Everything Everywhere All At Once become incredibly successful, and the sequel to 2017’s hit Indonesian horror movie Pengabdi Setan (Satan’s Slaves) is on track to be one of them. Released only about a week ago, Pengadi Setan 2: Communion has already garnered national attention and over 3 million theater viewers along with a record-breaking 500,000 viewers during the one-day early screening of the movie. Seeing all this hype surrounding the movie and being a massive fan of director Joko Anwar’s other work, including the first Satan’s Slaves, I watched it on opening day in order to avoid spoilers. I walked out of the theater slack-jawed, slightly trembling (though I’d never admit that out loud) with a head full of thoughts and questions.

Most sequels, especially highly anticipated ones, come out lackluster and underwhelming (looking at you, Love and Thunder), but this film could not be further from that. Instead, Anwar delivers a terrifying, bloody, and intense film filled with mystery and twists while still maintaining the same amount of heart. At its core, the movie is about a family’s love and loyalty to each other.

For the uninitiated, Satan’s Slaves (2017) is a remake of a 1982 film of the same name and follows a family’s struggle with grief and mysterious undead forces that start to disturb them following their matriarch’s death. Both the original and the remake, along with other works by Anwar, are available on Netflix, and I can not recommend them enough. This sequel picks up a few years after the ending of the first film with the middle children Bondi and Tony now grown up and Rini deciding that they are finally old enough for her to leave for university. Their youngest brother, Ian, is nowhere to be seen (yet), confirming that they never did rescue him from the grips of the undead at the end of the first movie. They now live in a state-owned apartment building and have some new neighbors, including Wisnu, who becomes part of the gang, his mother, and a few other people who don’t serve any real purpose in the overall plot but are interesting nonetheless.

The first act of the movie sets up the upcoming circumstances and their importance: the apartment building is built on cheap, sinking land, and the huge storm that’s been forecasted to strike the area will undoubtedly flood the building. This situation leads Rini, who is set to leave in the morning, to reconsider her choice to leave as she doesn’t want to leave her family in the middle of a flood. Her dilemma ends up going right out the window as the film gets scarier and more intense. Most of the film is set inside the apartment building, which is lit in such a way that it feels endless yet claustrophobic all at once. I won’t give away much more than what I already have, but the amount of twists, turns, and shocking scenes had the entire theater gasping and screaming together in fear. However, despite all the genuinely harrowing gore and hair-raising horror, this film is surprisingly much funnier than I, or anyone, had anticipated. Bondi and his two best friends especially make the movie more fun and bearable – their dialogue could have easily been cringe, but it was delivered with such precision that it felt completely natural.

Even though I did immensely enjoy this film, it did have a few things that could have been improved upon. This time around, because of the bigger cast of characters, the leads have been split into several different groups Stranger Things style to explore different areas of the building. While this did effectively move the plot along smoothly and kept up the momentum of the film, I did find myself wishing that the family had more screen time together. Almost the entirety of the first film is centered around just the family, so it felt odd that we didn’t know much about how any of them are doing now and how they were coping with it aside from suggestions that they’ve been in denial about the whole ordeal. The distribution of the scares and ‘ghosts’ felt uneven between the groups as well; one of them escapes completely unscathed and (mostly) unbothered.

The biggest issue I had with the entire movie was a scene where – spoiler ahead – three little girls go under the apartment’s elevator full of people to catch coins that had been dropped there, and proceed to get crushed by the falling broken elevator, thus covering a fourth girl completely in blood. If this description of the scene alone made you grimace, imagine watching it come to life on a big screen, convincingly acted out by very talented actors. The issue lies in the pointlessness of it – even without those three girls dying, the whole apartment complex would have been shaken up by the deaths of everyone who had been in the elevator when it crashed. The girls do come back as specters to haunt the girl who witnessed their deaths, but even then it was unnecessary because they introduced another specter (this time in the form of her mother) into the equation, and they could have easily given her a bigger part instead of giving small parts to four different ghosts.

Despite its flaws and shortcomings, I did thoroughly enjoy this movie and it was a fitting follow-up to an amazing first film. The ending did leave me with more questions than answers, but I think the mystery of it all is what made me, and a lot of other people, come back for more. The potential for another sequel is there, but if this is the last time we see Rini and the gang, I’m more than happy with that too.

Satan's Slaves 2 is now available to (legally) stream on Shudder.