Five years after the incredible success of the horror “Pengadbi setan” or “Satan’s Slaves”, which is still the most watched Indonesian horror of all time, the master of the genre there, Joko Anwar, decided to finally make a sequel. And “Pengadbi setan 2: Communion” is not far behind its predecessor, and the story continues with the previous film. The family we met in the first film moved from the village to the city. At least that part of the family that survived the first part and settled on the far edge of an unnamed city, in a new skyscraper that stands out lonely and should probably be just the beginning of a new apartment block.
However, we see that something diabolical will happen again in the very introduction, which takes us thirty years into the past, to 1955, when the army kidnaps a young journalist and takes him to a secret location where countless corpses are exhumed ritually. And this does not happen by chance, because for one storm that will cut off the skyscraper from the rest of the world, corpses will also begin to appear. Those who remember the first part know that the family had to deal with a satanist cult, and it seems that some evil forces decided to follow them in the city.
And it is obvious that for the second part, Anwar managed to obtain a much larger budget, and in terms of production, it is not at all behind similar American genre works. Here again, Anwar masterfully balances between the standard western postulates of the genre and Indonesian demonology, i.e. local themes, and I wouldn’t be surprised if “Satan’s Slaves” gets a third sequel in a few years. It is interesting how in recent years, just somehow with the appearance of the first part of “Satan’s Slaves”, the horror scene there has come to life, and how, along with Anwar, other young authors are appearing who make solid films.