Review: Dancing Village: The Curse Begins
The Exorcist Meets the Red Shoes
I’m not sure I fully understand the mythology of the Indonesian horror film, DANCING VILLAGE: THE CURSE BEGINS. I’m not sure I really need to. The film starts off in 1955, as a group of young women perform a ritual meant to sacrifice one of the dancers to an evil spirit that holds their village under its control. It turns out, though, that the ceremony is a trap meant to wrest a powerful bangle away from the demon, freeing the town. The trinket is delivered to a young woman, who flees into the forest as the demon, Badarawuhi (Aulia Sarah), demands the bangle’s return.
Flash forward to 1980. The daughter of the fleeing woman, Mila (Maudy Effrosina), has returned to the village, with her cousin Yuda (Jourdy Pranata) and friend Arya (Ardit Erwandha) in tow. Mila’s mother has lapsed into a possession-ish comatose state, and at the urging of a shaman, Mila has returned to the Dancing Village to bring back the bangle, in the hopes of breaking the spell. Things – to put it mildly – don’t quite go as planned.
Director Kimo Stamboel plays around with a fractured timeline throughout DANCING VILLAGE. Many times it works, as with the eventual revelation of why Mila is counseled to return the bangle to a village that went to dangerous lengths to get rid of it. Sometimes it’s just confusing, as during a flashback meant to reveal what actually happened during that fateful, bangle-stealing dance. Where Stamboel is on firmer footing is how he rallies his filmic tools to convey a deepening atmosphere of supernatural menace. He starts off with the practical – corn roasting on a grill to put up ominous swirls of smoke; or dashes of strobe lights to highlight an abattoirish hallucination – and eventually pulls in an impressive array of camera tricks: subtle color shifts; eerie, on-camera transformations; and, most striking, a push into and then out of a character, during which their surroundings dramatically change.
But the most impressive tool in Stamboel’s kit of terrors may be Aulia Sarah. Her sinuous, seductive presence turns Badarawuhi into an indelible portrait of sensuous evil. Whether violating the personal space of her victims, or dragging Mila into a netherworld where trapped souls are forced to dance for Badarawuhi’s pleasure, Sarah makes the demon the kind of malevolence that chills you to the bone, even as you beg for more.
I do wish Stamboel had put a little more effort into deepening our understanding of the village and its curse. Early on, we’re told the Dancing Village received its name because of the talents it produces, and later we see a group of women being trained in traditional dance, but there’s nothing further to tie the village’s culture to the supernatural forces that plague its populace. That’s unfortunate — it would have provided some compelling context to all the scary stuff.
DANCING VILLAGE: THE CURSE BEGINS is a prequel to KKN DE DESA PENARI, a film in which Aulia Sarah made her debut as Badarawuhi. I have not seen that film, am not sure it has even had a U.S. release, and doubt that it matters: Since the events of KKN follow those of DANCING VILLAGE, there probably isn’t anything in it that would have clarified any confusions I encountered. That’s okay, though. What DANCING VILLAGE: THE CURSE BEGINS lacks in textual coherence, it makes up for with carefully escalating menace and pure visual bravura. It’s a ghost story with a distinctive, Indonesian flavor, and that makes it worth the trip.