DreadOut

 After the Mo brothers went their own ways, Timo Tjahjanto probably got the lion's share of attention - putting out one of the best action movies of the '00s will do that. But his former partner in crime Kimo Stamboel's didn't do too badly - he directed his own, pretty great action movie, and then did a movie adaptation of everyone's favorite Indonesian videogame/fatal frame... 'homage'. 

 Yes, DreadOut got a movie. There's even a couple of scenes that replicate the game's first person mode. It's a game I've only played a couple of hours of, and a long time ago, so I can't really comment on how faithful it is, but I will say that Stamboel is absolutely one of the best possible directors they could have gotten; When it's good, it sings. Unfortunately he also writes, and, well, he's not so good at that side of things.

 The first scene is excellent - a couple of really great, evocative establishing shots, and then it's right into the mayhem as some sort of cult are coercing a woman to perform a ritual on their behalf. By threatening her little girl, in her own apartment. It's a really tense scene even before it becomes clear that the tied-up bundle in the coffee table, within a ritual circle, contains some sort of demon. The cult succeeds in pulling a ceremonial knife out of the demon's mouth, but the police arrives and stops whatever it was that they were planning to do to celebrate.

 Some years later Linda (Caitlin Halderman), the little girl who was present at the ritual, is in high school, and grown into a teenaged version of your stereotypical final girl: she's serious and holds a job to take care of her father while all the other idiots party around her. And said idiots are fucking despicable influencer wannabes that whine about how few followers they have; Even the supposed 'nice guy' of the group joins in on bullying some younger students. Good thing we're in a horror movie, right?
 The teens (Jefri Nichol, Marsha Aruan, Ciccio Manassero, Susan Sameh and Irsyadillah) have a plan to go into a nearby 'haunted' apartment block to do a livestream- and we know that it's actually haunted, because it's the same building from the prologue, abandoned since that incident. The catch? The groundskeeper won't let them in. Luckily Linda knows him, so they convince her to skip her shift and go with them.

 Nothing much happens in the building until the kids, drawn by the police tape, wander into the same apartment where the cult did their thing all that time ago. There they discover a ritual circle and some weird red leather pages with Sanskrit (love that a high schooler can recognize Sanskrit! Or is that a thing in Indonesia?); One of the pages seems blank, but when her phone flashes on it Linda sees some sort of writing no one else can see.
 And... she reads it aloud. That's it, I'm done, she can fucking die along with all the others as far as I'm concerned. I'm officially rooting for the deadites. The ritual words (the same ones her mother was forced to read once upon a time) convert the ritual circle into a whirling pool of black water, and all the kids are drawn in.

 Linda and one of the others end up in a jungle somewhere, but as the film is desaturated and blue-tinted, it's clear that it's a horror jungle. She soon gets attacked by zombie-like monsters, but her phone flash burns them like some sort of weapon. And from there starts a running battle with a powerful spirit who can possess the kids and throw them around telekinetically, who's still sore after the cult stole her favorite knife. Meanwhile, the others kids back in the real world and do a lot of nothing in the most annoying way possible.

 The main thing to have in mind about this movie is that, despite first appearances and Stamboel's track record, it's aimed straight at teenagers. So any hopes of the shitty teens getting sliced and impaled like satay quickly evaporates. The other thing is that the script is incredibly stupid. Sometimes to humorous effect, like all the ridiculous leaps in logic people make (which of course are always absolutely correct), or the groundskeeper taking a quick look at the swirling black portal and nonchalantly blaming it on a leaky pipe (making him my favorite character in the movie by a country mile).
 Most of the time, though, it's just bad. Painfully bad, even. Which is a shame, because there are a lot of good ideas and cool shots; Stamboel's direction is assured, energetic, and sometimes inspired (a shot of a striking axe, filmed along the path it travels, is very Raimi-esque). There are also some amazing sets,  with a couple of striking tableaux which I'm guessing come straight from the games, well captured  by cinematographer Patrick Tashadian. 

 The shitty script, along with the film pulling nearly all of its punches (See? Teens really do ruin everything!) means that I can't conscionably recommend this. Or... Maybe? If it's easily available to you, or if you have more tolerance for this sort of thing. All the good stuff doesn't quite make up for the inane story, but it's close.