Aurora here.
No, we’re not reviewing The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. The other Sabrina. No, not the 90’s Sabrina the Teenage Witch. The other, other Sabrina, the Indonesian film on Netflix. I’m a horror movie buff, and, yeah, I’ll even watch the terrible ones. I give Sabrina 11 out of 10 stars. Mmhm. It’s my rating system, so I can give extra stars. Marie and I had a ball watching this movie.
Sabrina, as you may have suspected, is subtitled. I don’t know how anyone watches movies without subtitles. I have subtitles selected for everything. It prevents me from having to rewind ten seconds to better hear something an actor mumbled.
The movie begins with a woman named Andini, stuck to the side of a house like she’s a nightgown-clad Spiderman. And she’s roaring. I mean, if I had the ability to climb like Spiderman, I might roar, too. “YOU WILL ALL KNOW MY POWER AS MY LIMBS FREAKISHLY ADHERE TO THE SIDING, MERE MORTALS!” We discover later that the woman is married to a man named Arka and has a daughter named Vanya. Somehow Vanya was sleeping through all of this or something? I don’t know where she was. But how was she unaware of her mother pulling Spiderman shit and roaring like Simba? I would have been really excited about this as a child (and as an adult, too).
There’s this odd cut to the woman when she first acquired her superhuman powers (re: demonic possession). She’s on a late-night fridge run and blood starts gushing from her mouth. I was pretty sure she was dead, but, nah. There are some explainers in the husband’s voice, and he’s all, “Her appearance changed.”
What does this mean? Well, her eyes go pale. Her skin decays in spots, leaving big, bloody sores on her cheeks. Oh, and she gets a nose that makes her look a bit like the trolls in EPCOT’s Norway ride. I don’t know why the nose thing happened. It’s never explained.
Two demon hunters come to fight the entity that’s taken over Andini. Their names are Laras and Raynard. They’re a bit like the Warrens; they show up where there’s supernatural trouble, except they kind of suck at what they do. I mean they get their asses kicked and people die.
Except the cops seem to think Laras and Raynard are highly capable. There is a bloody scene where police arrive at the same time as Laras and Raynard, and the cops are pretty much all, “You two handle this. We’ll wait outside.” Stabby stuff with sprays of blood and a woman crawling (not the creepy crawling, just crawling) are happening inside. And clearly, Laras and Raynard are more capable than the police force.
I couldn’t help but wonder how Andini’s and Akra’s deaths were explained to the police. Did Laras and Raynard say, “Demons!” and the police said, “Okay. I’ll put that in the report,” and it was just fine?
Then we cut to a scene of Vanya moving in with her Uncle Aiden and his new wife, Maira. It’s her birthday, but she’s understandably sad about her parents’ deaths. The brutal and bloody deaths of her parents put a damper on her festive spirits.
Vanya soon cheers up where she learns of the Charlie-Charlie game (the one with pencils) from a friend at school and she tries to contact her mother. She also has this super legit looking app to track spirits. It’s got these bright green, goopy looking letters (like I said, very professional) and the tracker doesn’t actually show the location of the entity. I guess it doesn’t matter whether or not the app points her in the proper directions. Vanya just wanders to the creepiest and darkest parts of the house.
Oh, and I almost forgot about Sabrina. Oops. It turns out Uncle Aiden is a toymaker and inherited his family’s toy factory. He decided to re-release the very popular Sabrina dolls and made a larger one for Maira. I have no idea why these things are popular, but the movie shows us long lines of little girls with their parents waiting for one of these hideous dolls. They have gargantuan noses, much like Andini after “her appearance changed.” Their eyes are bigger than those Ty stuffed animals with the gargantuan eyes. All Sabrina dolls look exactly the same. And, yes, all are named Sabrina. Spoiler: the demon inhabits Sabrina. We see the doll’s gigantic eyes move and it’s found in different places throughout the house. Maira blames the poor housekeeper. Seriously, Maira is rude to this character at several different times. Most notably is when a possessed Vanya (whose appearance also changed) stabbed the hell out of her. No one even bothered to bury the housekeeper. Presumably the police were never called. Shortly after, we see an un-possessed Vanya, happily walking down the street with her favorite doll. No, she’s not even the least bit troubled by the housekeeper’s death. Or the fact that she stabbed the fuck out of this woman, who had been playing with her before she met her demise.
But the movie isn’t over, even though it seems like it should be. The producers really wanted to keep this story going. And so Maira is possessed when she, her husband, and Vanya go to a doll factory. Laras and Raynard arrive soon after and perform a demon summoning ritual. It involves the word, “You who likes cigarettes!” Mmhm. I guess the demon has the same addiction I do.
This is certainly a must-watch film. I can safely say I’ve never seen anything like it.
Hollow Hills 