By: JWBM
Time. One has ample opportunity in this day and age to do something that amuses and entertains. We could go out and enjoy the fresh air; find a corner and read a book; or sit down and potentially get lost in another world with a film. "The Secret: Suster Ngesot Urban Legend "—an Indonesian horror/thriller—is neither an adequate escape, nor will you come out better than you left for deciding to spend the next hour and thirty eight minutes with it.
Essentially a young woman races out of her dad's glitzy mansion. Blinded by emotions, she veers off the road and ends up in the hospital. Then after she gets random visits by a series of zombie-like ghosts who always pop up when you least expect. This feels like it was directed by one of the interns on a soap opera set where the acting is overly dramatic, there are more coincidences than you can count, and the tone has a tendency to have erratic mood swings.
One of the biggest issues is it has a tendency to jump right into something, then backtrack as to where it was headed. It's to the point that when attempting to establish frights, you have no idea what you're supposed to be actually scared of. Often it works up to some suspense, then fizzles away as if the day goes on. It has little driving point to get behind other than borrowing this or that from more effective thrillers. Something bad is happening to a spoiled woman who has the personality and character development of a wooden shoe. Is that really a selling point? There are a share of non-sensical, out-of-place scenes that go from head-scratching, annoying, to laugh-out-loud for all the wrong reasons. It feels like the film had a different script rewrite each day.
The setups and the character interactions feel forced and often times come on too fast. Even the little things that would make this world real: such as a cut and pasted scene at the hospital with a woman who mishears a nurse and thinks her relative got it more worse was supposed to be a comedic setup. The main character gets invited into a home of a person she doesn't know. Cut scene to "Drink this," and they are intimately chatting about supernatural events like it's an every day occurance. Practically everything here feels like a puppeteer that becomes visible and you can't get the strings orchestrating it out of your mind.
Its footing flows as smooth as cleats on concrete. It has no concept of natural progression, or establishing any sort of suspension of disbelief. You end up feeling so disconnected to the events and characters that every slow and agonizing second that goes by feels another minute you could have been doing something else.
From Black to Red recommends instead: "The Abandoned" for showing us how you can take a simple haunted house type story and effectively make the hairs stick up on the back of your neck.
Rating: 1/10
Director: Arie Azis
Actors: Nagita Slavina, Raffi Ahmad
Info: Wikipedia link
Trailer: YouTube link
Urban legend info: Link
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