FILM REVIEW: QUEEN OF BLACK MAGIC

Queen of Black Magic
Director: Kimo Stamboel
Writer: Joko Anwar
Starring: Ario Bayu, Hannah Al Rashid, Ade Firman Hakim

While I appreciated a great genre (or subgenre) hop, this one finds itself treading water with exposition dumps and extended scenes of supernatural torture for a bit too long just to make the feature runtime.

Thanks to the success of films like The Raid: Redemption and Shudder’s curation, Indonesian cinema has earned a lot of international attention over the last several years in the horror and gritty crime genres. With a wider audience it has allowed for the remakes of iconic Indonesian horror treasures like Satan’s Slaves and The Queen of Black Magic.

This story is about three men, who return to the orphanage they grew up in to say their goodbyes to the owner of the estate and the man who raised them, the ailing Mr. Bandi (Yayu A.W. Unru). While there, the men and their families are terrorized by a supernatural force that desires revenge for a dark secret the men and Mr. Bandi covered up.

First off, the film follows plotlines and tropes that horror fans commonly associate with Asian horror, but it does a great job in making it its own. Now it is a remake and feels like a Hollywoodized remake -- meaning they updated dialogue and gave it a sleeker look. But overall fans of those type of movies will enjoy it, as the first half is dread and tension, while the second half morphs into this almost Evil Dead approach of demonic possessions and unforgiving brutality upon all the characters, and by all, I mean even the children get torture segments. I will preface that the violence is all digital, so it loses some of its intensity, and while intense, it never crosses that line into extremity that would be off-putting for a good portion of horror fans.

Speaking of its flip of subgenres: it brings up an interesting topic that I have been wanting to discuss for some time but have not had the movie to review that connected. From a western (the hemisphere, not the genre) story approach, a lot of times we need to clearly identify what the genre is. While there are some exceptions like Bone Tomahawk or From Dusk till Dawn, which starts as a crime thriller and switches to a vampire siege movie without real hints or foreshadowing in the beginning, for the most part these are a hard sell, and reason to avoid making because they are hard to market. It seems with eastern storytelling approaches there are laxer views on genre hopping (Audition and The Wailing are a few). I am mentioning all this because as a western viewer, there is a point about 45 out of the 100 minutes in where major realizations and reveals that occur would normally happen near the end. Since these reveals happen so early on, and the mystery of what really happened is the groundwork the movie is built on, subconsciously or consciously, it feels like it must be nearing the end, but we are not officially halfway through yet. While I appreciated a great genre (or subgenre) hop, this one finds itself treading water with exposition dumps and extended scenes of supernatural torture for a bit too long just to make the feature runtime.

Another element that requires discussion comes from the characters themselves. The actors all do an incredible job and they fit within the movie, but the story primarily revolves around Hanif (Ario Bayu) and his family. This is another one of those instances where the main family (primarily Hanif and one of the children) are there to get us to the resolution, because the supporting characters are so much more compelling. The characters of Maman (Ade Firman Hakim) and Siti (Sheila Dara Aisha) steal the show as the husband and wife who were the orphans that stayed behind to take care of the place. Even though they have such little screen time there is so many wonderfully genuine nuances between them. On a side note, I was sad to hear that Hakim passed away from Covid-19 on September 14th, 2020. For the most part the roles are sparce, giving a few characters one trait to identify them: like the diet-obsessed wife, the germaphobe wife, the flirty daughter, the loving mother/wife, etc. If you could not tell from my examples there’s kind of a gender theme of which characters are more likely to be undeveloped, but it strangely plays into the dark reveal and story about “good” men. Which also is an interesting topic of conversation that the movie makes several times about orphans, commenting how a character happened to turn out “good” despite being an orphan.

In the end, The Queen of Black Magic has some plot issues, lulls, and undeveloped bits but it is worth a watch if you are in the mood for a new spooky movie with family or friends.


3 ½ out of 5

Review by Craig Draheim