This is a hard movie to review. Possession is one of my favorite movies of all time, a movie that I described by writing “They should attack you. They should change your consciousness. They should take your psyche like a rock tumbler and slam you against the walls over and over until you emerge better.”

It seems like director Razka Robby Ertanto and writers Lele Laila and Andrzej Zulawski have set up an impossible task to remake this movie. Yet Indonesian and world cinema often takes films that have existed before — America does the same — and puts their own spin on the film. Sometimes, it works. Often, it doesn’t.

The title “Official Indonesian Remake” was interesting, because I remember the days that things could just be ripped off and no one knew. But now the internet exists.

The other person who has a huge mountain to climb is Carissa Perusset, who plays Ratna, the Anna (or Helen, right?) of this movie is always going to be compared to Isabelle Adjani, the only actress I know to win Best Actress at Cannes for a movie that ended up on the Video Nasties list. She shares the burden with Sara Fajira, who plays Mita, the actress who gets to re-enact Adjani’s spectacular subway freakout moment. Ah, who knew 2024 would be the year that more than one more would cover Possession? Unlike The First Omen, this one had to have that scene or we’d be upset, like when a band doesn’t play its biggest hit.

If you’re looking for that strange octopus creature that wormed its way between Adjani’s thighs, well, it’s been replaced by a pocong, a ghost that looks like a person wrapped in a funeral cloth. In Islamic funerals, dead bodies must be covered in white fabric tied over the head, under the feet and on the neck, as well as being firmly tied at multiple junctures to maintain its position during the journey to the grave. Upon placement into the grave, it is believed that the knots must be undone or the corpse will animate and haunt friends and family as a pocong.

Faris (Darius Sinathrya) is a soldier who has just returned home. Instead of his wife Ratna reacting with joy, she demands a divorce. She’s been acting strange for some time, a fact that his son Budi (Sultan Hamonangan) can see when he isn’t speaking in the third person, directly to the audience or screaming that both of his parents are demons. Faris has an easy answer, thinking she’s cheating with the movie director she scripts for, Wahyu (Nugie). Or at least that’s what Mita thinks. Then again, she’s always wanted Faris.

This movie is, well, horny. Where the original had sex — cold and horror-filled sex — this is clad in deep reds and mixes giallo-esque danger and furtive alleyway couplings mixed with stab wounds and bodies sailing downward onto cars. By the end of the film, Perusset’s moans have nearly become the soundtrack. Everyone is so overloaded with lust that even the exorcist, Toni (Arswendy Bening Swara) is more interested in making love to the tied up Ratna than saving her.

Żuławski made Possession instead of killing himself after his divorce. I wonder what these filmmakers had in mind, as the original seems to be so effusive that it’s hard to say who is to blame. Here, it’s definitely every man who appears on screen except for Budi, who literally pulls the curtain back at the end, telling us that he’s too young to watch this movie.

The only downer is that this descends into jump scares and possession scenes at the end, forgetting that while the title of the movie does reference that element of the supernatural, it’s truly about the emotional gulf that happens when love goes away.

I don’t regret the time I spent watching this, but it won’t replace the film I already own.