Roh 2019

In a remote forest, two children, Along Mhia Farhana and Angah Harith Haziq, live with their widowed mother Mak Farah Ahmad in a tumbledown shed. One day, they stumble upon a dead deer hanging high among the branches, a disturbing sign of the forest’s harsh balance. On their way home, they notice a young girl who begins to follow them, and she becomes known to the family simply as Adik Putri Qaseh, a little sister in name if not in origin.

Mak recounts a chilling legend about a restless forest spirit that is cursed to hunt animals and children alike, a malevolent force that can be warded off only by two rocks struck together and a whispered mantra. The next morning, the atmosphere shifts: the family wakes to find Adik eating raw birds, and she ominously proclaims that they will all be dead by the next full moon before she drives a blade across her own throat. In shock, the family discards Adik’s body in a clearing, trying to cling to sanity as the forest settles back into its uneasy quiet.

When they return home, they encounter Tok [June Lojong], an old woman who calls herself Tok and who is drawn to rocks that suddenly appear around the house overnight. Tok warns that the rocks are a bad omen and instructs the children to discard them. That night, Along experiences a frightening encounter with a spectral figure resembling Adik in the crawl space beneath their house, and a high fever soon follows. Mak seeks Tok’s help, and Tok conducts a ritual that involves Angah’s supposed sacrifice of two white pigeons, though the boy secretly lets one bird go free, defying the omen in a quiet act of mercy.

A hunter arrives at the home seeking Adik, but Mak turns him away. Later, Along sleepwalks and wakes at Adik’s gravesite, where the apparition returns. The hunter finds a terrified Along in the forest and brings her back to Mak, who becomes convinced that the hunter may have harmed Adik. Along, shaken, tells the hunter the truth about Adik and urges Mak to abandon the forest for safety. The hunter, revealed to be Adik’s father, discovers that Adik’s body has vanished and mourns in silence as danger closes in on the family. In a moment of despair, Along lashes out and dies after striking her head against a sharp metal protrusion on the floor.

Fear tightens its grip on Mak, who plans to leave the forest with Angah in tow, though the younger boy slips away in search of food. The hunter warns Mak that evil forces are closing in, and Mak’s resistance to his warnings clashes with a growing sense of dread. When he later finds Angah in the woods, Angah is killed by a swift slash of his throat, and Mak silently ascends from the shadows, driving a spear through the hunter in a final act of desperate self-preservation.

The scene shifts as Tok reappears, standing over Adik’s body in a shallow grave and revealing a terrifying truth: she is an iblis, a demon that possesses humans to harvest souls, and Adik’s body has become a vessel for her dark deeds. Tok taunts the hunter with the reminder that he could not save Angah, and the forest’s spirits—Along, Angah, and Adik—appear to drift through the trees in a mournful, spectral procession. The film closes on a harrowing image: Along sets fire to the family home, the flames consuming the structure as Mak—the wounded, bloodied mother—sits nearby, and the bodies of her children lie within or around the burning house, a haunting end to a family torn apart by grief, superstition, and an unyielding forest.