Let’s go back to Indonesia.
Danur follows the story of a young girl named Risa who can see ghosts. She wants to befriend these three young ghosts (for reasons unknown) and therein is the problem with this film.
We are thrown into the story with almost no backstory. Aside from a brief narration about how Risa can see ghosts we are given almost no rationale behind anything in the movie. The script feels gutted, there is no other word for it, I honestly think something can cut out of production or they ran out of time.
We get flashbacks that make almost no sense filled with characters who have no motivations. I honestly tried looking around for more information as I don’t know what they hell this movie is about. (It certainly doesn’t help that the subtitles drop off during the children’s songs, so who knows what I missed here).
Perhaps the most annoying part is that they chose to film this as a horror movie when there is no reason for it to be shot in this way. A story about a girl who sees ghosts and through her childlike innocence can befriend them could have been interested. However, we have to have stupid and loud jump scares every minute.
This might be one of the most jump scare heavy horror films I have seen. They could have played it for laughs it is so relentless.
The story isn’t scary, the ghosts (well, most of them) seem kind, so what is the point? Even the forced attempts to make the ghosts visibly scary don’t seem to have a purpose other than a cheap scare tactic. The odd transition to a more traditional horror film halfway through leaves us with more underdeveloped characters and a continued lack of purpose.
We are given a sort of resolution that doesn’t matter because we don’t know this people. The film is only about 70 minutes, and this isn’t enough time to develop a decent story with nearly 60% of the running time being cheap set-ups for jump scares.
I am almost certain there is symbolism here I am missing due to the cultural and lingual gap between creator and viewer, but as it is now this film just doesn’t make a lot of a sense. However, even with a deeper understanding, this one would still be relentlessly annoying with the jump scares. I think this is worth skipping.
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