Spirit (Soul) | Malaysia | 2019 (HD) - REVIEW - Horror.

A mother and her two children live in an isolated hut deep in the jungle A series of strangers keep visiting the family while strange and supernatural events keep occurring. Who are these people? And what do they want with this family? From first time director Emir Ezwan, let’s head to the jungles of Malaysia and check out this spooky chiller.

Hi I’m The Arty Dans from Asian Film Fans and welcome to this review of the Malaysian horror film Roh, also known as Soul. Two young children, Along and Angah, live with their mother in an isolated hut deep in the jungle, just a short distance away from the other village.

They’re rather self-sufficient, using the jungle and trading with others to satisfy their needs. A lost little girl follows them home and they take her in, giving her some food and during the evening the mother tells the children a tale: a story of a mysterious figure, a ghost hunter, who roams the jungle slaying beasts.

And that’s when the strange things start to happen. An unexplained collection of rocks falls in the clearing in front of their hut, then tragedy strikes the little girl. After they bury her deep in the jungle, another two strangers visit their hut. The first is a mysterious woman, Tok, who lives on the side of the river.

On her way to collect plants to make medicine, she sees the stones and informs the family that they are a bad omen. The second visitor is a half blind man wielding a spear looking for the little girl. Instantly a sense of fear overcomes the family as they call the story of the ghost hunter and his particularly vivid description of the girl.

What is his connection to the girl? Who are three mysterious visitors that have come to visit them? And how are they call connected? This is the second jungle curse movie I have seen from Malaysia this year, the other one being 7ujuh, and while the only similarities they have are the setting and the curse, this could start to be one of my new favourite horror genres.

Certainly, something like Indonesia’s Impetigore ramps up the setting and productions values a lot more, but what’s here in Soul isn’t bad at all. The gore in the movie is mainly relegated to the mangled corpses of animals, although there are some scenes of bloodied children, so watch out for them, while the short running time of just over 80 minutes is more than enough to keep your attention the whole way while still telling an edge of your seat story.

Part of what I liked most about this movie is that a large potion of it is set in the day time. It’s far too easy for a director to make a horror movie set in the jungle at night; a lot of those spooks and chills write themselves But it does take some talent to set a horror movie during the day and still find ways to remain creepy.

The hanging deer scene, long and lingering while the two children curiously look at, instantly invoke dread. How could a deer possibly be hanging dead in tree, with nothing around to claim its body? What’s great about this is that Angah, the boy, doesn’t immediately question how odd it is, but rather how much meat is on offer and why they’re just leaving it behind in the jungle.

And in fact we meet all of our characters in the movie during the day time. The creepy girl being the only exception and that happens right in the beginning, which if you’re paying enough attention, foreshadows exactly what’s going to happen in the film.

The finale though, is set in the night time. Also the movie does creepy children right, not choosing to have them as little ghost girl. This was welcomed. I will admit that, at times, I struggled to follow the story. Not wanting to give anything away for this movie, and this is more of a thing to do with me than the movie itself, but I was struggling to match up all the characters, their involvement in the curse, and how the curse manifest and transfers itself from one soul to another.

This may not be a problem for you though. With movies like this, Malaysian horror is going somewhere. Somewhat controversially, I would recommend this over Impetigore for several reasons. I think the basic storyline here is far more interesting, the small cast of characters allows us as the audience more time to get to know them without blowing out the run time and I think the jungle setting is beautiful, with exquisite camera work, colour grading and ambient audio.