How
do the powerful and privileged become ever more so? Black magic. We’re not
saying it actually works, but Mona Fandey had plenty of patrons who believed so.
The nightclub singer turned shaman achieved infamy when one of her rituals
slightly misfired. She decapitated an up-and-coming politician. Look, we’ve all
been there, but its still embarrassing when it happens to you. Yet, her fictionalized
analog takes this setback in stride throughout Dain Said’s long awaited Dukun (trailer here), which screens
during the 2018 New York Asian Film Festival.
Right,
so Diana Dahlan’s ritual for the ambitious Dato’ Jeffri was not the smashing
success they both hoped for, but things could be worse. As she sagely notes, at
least he paid in advance. That attitude isn’t helpful when she is tried in the media,
ahead of her courtroom trial, but her smugness is disconcerting, suggesting she
knows something everyone else doesn’t, most
particularly including her counsel, Karim Osman. The last thing he
needed was a case like this, but is forced to accept, in exchange for help finding
his daughter Nadia from a City Hall contact.
As
Osman searches high and low with Daud, a private investigator of sorts, who
happens to be attuned to occult matters, he actually does a half-decent job
defending Dahlan. He scores enough points to irritate Talib, the lead cop on
the case, but his own client’s cryptic hints regarding Nadia’s disappearance
are not exactly reassuring.
It
will seem bizarre to Americans who do not live in California or on a college campus
and therefore value free speech and expression that a film as benign as Dukun could be withheld from
distribution for twelve years. It might be transparently inspired by the Fandey
case, which was rather embarrassing to the ruling Sunni political party, but
Said and screenwriter Huzir Sulaiman avoid policy and ideology, while adding
plenty of their own invention—starting with Dahlan’s very real supernatural
powers.
Dukun is an unusual blend
of the courtroom drama and horror genres, which sounds strange, but actually
works pretty well. In fact, they juggle a fairly large cast and a good number
of subplots rather dexterously, even though they kill off one particularly intriguing
character far too soon (alas, such are the perils of being a character in a
horror movie).
As
Dahlan, Uime Aida is a femme fatale, with the emphasis on the “fatal.” There is
clearly supposed to be a feminist subtext to her prosecution, but she is so fabulously
sinister, she undercuts the gender politics. Of course, from a horror fan’s
perspective that is totally cool. On the other side of the spectrum, Adlin Aman
Ramliee is completely convincing as the completely out of his depth Osman. Ramli
Hassan is seriously righteous as Daud, while director-thesp Nam Ron is all
kinds of hardnosed as Talib.
