If you’ve ever thought, “I’d like a cozy family drama, but make it rural, cursed, and emotionally annihilating,” Roh is basically the universe answering, “Sure, and I’ll throw in an iblis, a dead deer, and a child casually eating raw birds for breakfast.” Emir Ezwan’s Roh (or Soul) is a small, quiet Malaysian folk horror film that somehow feels bigger than half the CGI exorcist flicks out there. It’s stripped-down, slow-burning, and deeply unsettling—the cinematic equivalent of feeling someone watching you from the tree line and realizing it’s not a person, it’s the forest. And yet, for all the dread and despair, there’s also this grim little grin baked into the film—like the movie knows it’s messing with you, and enjoys it. The setup is deceptively simple: a widowed mother known only as Mak, and her two children, Along and Angah, live in a ramshackle shack in the middle of a forest that practically sweats bad vibes. No electricity, no neighbors, no village gossip—just trees, mud, and a house that looks like it leaks both rainwater and ancestral trauma. From the first scenes, the film establishes a tone of quiet wrongness. The kids discover a dead deer hanging unnaturally high, snagged between branches like the forest has decided to start doing modern art. They don’t panic. They just… sort of accept it. Which tells you a lot about how bad the vibes usually are. Then they meet a strange, silent little girl in the woods who follows them home. If you’re a horror viewer, you’re already yelling, “Do NOT bring her inside.” Mak and the kids, however, are far too decent—and poor—to have seen any horror movies. They feed her, shelter her, call her Adik (“little sister”). In return, she: Eats raw birds like it’s KFC Calmly tells them they’ll all be dead by the next full moon Slits her own throat on their floor You know, standard houseguest issues. From that moment, Roh stops being a slow drip of unease and turns into a steady descent into spiritual ruin. It does it without jump scares, without bombastic music, and without any character doing something outrageously dumb. Everyone behaves like real people… and the horror still comes. Mak tries to do what any practical rural mother would do: haul the body out and leave it in the forest. “Not my child, not my problem,” essentially. But this is folk horror, so the forest, naturally, says: “Actually, it is your problem now.” An old woman shows up, calling herself Tok, as if she just wandered out of the trees with a faceful of secrets and a pension in dark rituals. She examines a ring of rocks that appeared mysteriously around Mak’s home, declares them a bad omen, and has the kids throw them away. That’s one of the joys of Roh: it doesn’t over-explain the supernatural stuff. Rocks appear. Stories are told. Spirits are mentioned. The characters accept these things as part of their worldview. The audience is left to piece together what’s symbolic, what’s literal, and what’s just the forest screwing with everyone. Mak tells her children a legend about a restless forest spirit cursed to hunt animals and children, and how you can protect yourself by knocking two rocks together while reciting a mantra. It’s the kind of folklore that sounds like something your grandmother would genuinely tell you—and then you’d awkwardly keep a couple of stones in your pocket just in case. The film never breaks that local, grounded perspective. There’s no priest flown in, no scientist explaining it’s all a fungus. It’s Malay folklore, Malay beliefs, and Malay fears, given the slow, reverent treatment usually reserved for European witch stories. It’s a refreshing change from the usual Western possession movie template—and a reminder that, if evil is global, at least it comes with different cultural flavors. The child performances in Roh are unsettlingly good. Along, the older sister, is brave and sensitive, clearly trying to be more grown-up than she is. Angah, the little brother, is curious, fidgety, and still in that stage where your main life skills are “wander off” and “make catastrophic choices with good intentions.” Adik, though… Adik is a whole other category. The way Putri Qaseh plays her is exactly right: not overtly demonic, not exaggeratedly spooky—just slightly wrong.Quiet, intensely watchful, calmly chomping on raw birds like it’s a personality trait. When she delivers that line—“You will all be dead by the next full moon”—it’s not a threat. It’s a statement. A weather report. And honestly, once someone who eats pigeons like sashimi says that to you, maybe just move? But of course, they don’t. Poverty, grief, and isolation have nailed Mak and her children to that spot, more tightly than any curse could. That’s another sharp edge of the film: the horror isn’t just supernatural—it’s economic. When you’re that poor, your options are “stay in haunted forest” or… nothing. Farah Ahmad’s performance as Mak is the emotional anchor of the movie. She’s not a typical horror-movie mom, shrieking in corners or manufacturing conflict. She’s tired. Permanently. Every choice she makes is filtered through “How do I keep these kids alive with nothing?” When Along falls ill after seeing Adik’s specter under the house, Mak doesn’t run to some spiritual authority out of blind faith. She goes to Tok because what else does she have? Doctors? Hospitals? Money? Absolutely not. She has rituals, old women, and birds to sacrifice. Even when Tok instructs Angah to kill two white pigeons, and he secretly sets one free, it doesn’t feel like a cliché. It feels like the kind of thing a kind-hearted child would do, without understanding that in horror movies, kindness is just another way to doom yourself. By the time one child dies, the other vanishes, and Mak is stalking the hunter through the forest with murder in her eyes, she’s less “final girl” and more “broken animal still biting in its death throes.” The movie never judges her. It just watches, calmly, as she loses everything. One of the most chilling aspects of Roh is that, at the end of the day, this family isn’t special. They’re not chosen. They’re not part of a prophecy. They’re not holding back some great cosmic balance. They’re just… available. Tok is revealed as an iblis—a demonic entity that exists by possessing humans and controlling their souls. She’s been using Adik’s body as a tool, pulling strings, nudging events, gently ruining lives like it’s a hobby. When she taunts the hunter and reveals her true nature, it’s not an operatic villain monologue. It’s almost casual. That’s what makes it so disturbing: this level of destruction—multiple dead children, a family annihilated—doesn’t even feel like the iblis had to try very hard. In a lot of horror, evil is obsessed with the protagonists. In Roh, evil barely notices them. They’re collateral damage in a much bigger game—one that’s eternal, ritualistic, and utterly indifferent to human suffering. You know, like bureaucracy, but with more dead deer. Cinematography-wise, Roh is a masterclass in “cheap, but gorgeous.” The camera lingers on damp earth, tangled roots, smoky interiors lit by oil lamps. The forest feels both vast and suffocating: walk long enough and you might find a way out—but you’ll probably just find another tree, another shadow, another omen. There are no flashy set pieces, no digital ghosts, no pyrotechnics. Just carefully framed dread. You’re waiting for something to leap out of the dark, and it rarely does. Instead, the horror seeps in from the edges: a strange shape, a figure in the background, a subtle wrongness in the way someone moves. It demands patience. If you come in expecting quick scares and loud bangs, you’ll probably spend the first half wondering when “something is going to happen.” Then you realize it already is—the family is being quietly dismantled, belief by belief, child by child. By the time we reach the final image—Along, now a spirit herself, burning down the family home with her mother and dead brother inside—it feels inevitable and yet somehow still shocking. It’s not catharsis. It’s a closing bracket. The forest takes back what little it ever allowed them to have. Roh is one of those horror films that feels less like a story and more like a curse someone told you in confidence. It’s small in scale, big in implication, and entirely uninterested in making you feel better afterward. It’s a standout not just in Malaysian cinema, but in folk horror in general. Where many horror movies scream at you, Rohwhispers. And what it whispers is something like: “You were never that important. The world is old. The forest is watching. And sometimes, the monsters don’t need a reason. They just need a house with holes in the roof and a family that can’t afford to leave.” Sleep tight.
Minimal Budget, Maximum Doom
Folklore, Forests, and Things You Really Shouldn’t Ignore
Kids: Still the Creepiest Part of Horror
Mak: Motherhood as a Perpetual Wound
The Horror of Being Unimportant to Evil
Visual Poetry, Slow Burn, and a Long, Quiet Scream
Final Verdict: Soft Voice, Sharp Teeth
