This effect is greatly aided by Reinchez Ng’s foreboding score as well. The director and his cinematographer Saifuddin Musa envelope viewers in a sense of desolate isolation – subtly compelling the idea that there’s a presence, a person, a creature, a something, just behind the abundant foliage. Going light on plot and dialogue but heavy on symbolism and metaphor, Emir does a fantastic job of crafting ominous imagery from the film’s natural surroundings. The family, and the audience, is at first unsure of who to trust –- which plays into Roh’s key themes of paranoia, pride and the primordial human instinct that anything unfamiliar in the wild, seen or unseen, is a potential threat. Lojong) offering assistance, while the other is an imposing spear-wielding hunter (Namron), who is tracking the mysterious aforementioned child.
One is a kindly shaman healer (Junainah M. The spooked and shaken family is soon beset by a series of frightening supernatural misfortunes, punctuated by visits from two other strangers. After they clothe, clean and feed her, the child suddenly prophesises that they will all die by the next full moon, before slitting her own throat.
One day, their simple life is up-ended when they decide to take in a mud-caked little girl (Putri Syahadah Nurqaseh) lost in the forest. Quickly, we gather that the single mother (played by Farah Ahmad) is distrustful of outsiders and prefers to raise her son Angah (Harith Haziq) and daughter Along (Mhia Farhana) in seclusion. Set in an indeterminate past, Roh follows an isolated family living in a barren hut deep in the jungle. And nowhere is that more evident than Kuman Pictures’ sophomore offering, Roh (Malay for ‘soul’), which made its mark as Malaysia’s official submission for the 93rd Academy Awards in the Best International Feature Film category.įilmed in just two weeks on a tiny budget of RM360,000 in the Dengkil forest of Selangor, this feature film debut from director Emir Ezwan is a thematically rich, slow-burning folk horror in the vein of Robert Eggers’ The Witch. Through its internationally acclaimed 2019 debut Two Sisters, the studio proved that its cost-effective and creatively challenging ethos could produce interesting alternatives to a genre inundated in the Southeast Asian mainstream by schlocky, jump-scare-driven efforts. Micro-budget production house Kuman Pictures has been a breath of fresh air in the Malaysian horror scene in recent years.
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