Satan’s Slaves 2: Communion is the rare sequel that doesn’t just try to top the first film—it widens the lens, deepens the lore, and politely drags an entire apartment block into hell for good measure. Joko Anwar takes the intimate family terror of Satan’s Slaves and scales it up into a full-blown supernatural disaster movie, except instead of heroic firefighters and stirring music, you get undead neighbors, cult communions, and a father whose side hustle is state-sponsored mass murder. Fun for the whole cursed family.
From Rural Haunting to High-Rise Hell
Where the first film trapped us in a creaky house in the countryside, Communion relocates the surviving Suwono family—Rini, Toni, Bondi, and their father Bahri—to Mandara Apartments, a grimy, decaying high-rise in 1984 Jakarta. You know it’s not going to be a good time the moment you see the building’s flickering lights, miserable tenants, and elevator that looks like it’s one prayer away from a lawsuit.
Rini is doing her best “eldest daughter holding the universe together with sheer willpower” routine, Toni is chronically stressed, Bondi is perpetually on the edge of trouble, and Bahri is… suspiciously busy, constantly disappearing with a locked briefcase and the look of a man who knows more than he’s admitting. It’s a classic family-in-survival-mode setup—but this is Joko Anwar, so you know the survival part is going to be very temporary.
The Opening: Cults, Corpses, and National Image Management
Before we even get back to the Suwonos, the prologue slaps us with pure horror absurdity: it’s 1955, and journalist Budiman is called by his cop friend Heru to Bosscha Observatory, where they find exhumed corpses neatly laid out around a framed portrait of Mawarni (Rini’s late mother) like some kind of satanic fan club meeting. The whole scene screams “international scandal,” but because the Bandung Conference is coming up, Heru is under strict orders to keep things quiet.
So what does he do? He tells Budiman to leak the story through obscure magazines. It’s state secrecy meets indie horror zine—Indonesian Cold War vibes with a side of occult panic. Right away, the movie sets its tone: supernatural horror baked directly into politics, history, and the kind of institutional denial that guarantees everything will get much, much worse.
Elevators, Floods, and the Worst Tenant Association Meeting Ever
Back in 1984, the tenants of Mandara Apartments are just trying to live their lives in peace. Naturally, the building has other plans. The elevator malfunctions and plummets, killing a bunch of residents in one brutally staged sequence that feels half slasher, half workplace safety PSA from hell.
Then a storm hits, flooding the area and turning Mandara into a drowned tomb. The power goes out. The phones are useless. Everyone is trapped inside a multi-story coffin with each other, the dark, and whatever has decided this is the perfect night for a supernatural reunion tour.
At this point, Communion shifts into glorious haunted-siege mode. You get neighbors rattling, doors banging, shadows staring, and that sinking feeling that the building itself is a portal with rent control from the underworld.
Wisnu, Sign Language, and Red Flags
One of the quietly genius touches is Wisnu, the young boy whose mother dies in the elevator crash. Rini comforts him, and he explains that he and his mom used a strange sign language from an occult book so they could talk without his abusive father understanding.
In any other film, that might be quirky character backstory. Here, it’s a massive red flag wrapped in tragedy: you’re literally communicating in the language of cult rituals, and your father is a walking anger issue. Nothing about that screams “stable upbringing.” When Wisnu later uses the same signs to talk with Ian—Rini’s deaf youngest brother, who was taken by the cult—it’s both touching and deeply ominous.
Bahri: Father, Provider, Government Hitman
Let’s talk about Bahri, because Communion absolutely does. Remember that briefcase he never lets go of? Yeah, it’s full of severed human fingers. This is not, strictly speaking, standard dad behavior.
We eventually learn (thanks to Budiman, now a hardened occult magazine editor) that Bahri convinced Mawarni to join the cult back in the 1950s in exchange for fertility and fame. She got children and stardom; he got a lifetime membership to “Murder for the Devil.” When Bahri tried to get them out, the cult hit him with a fun clause: kill one thousand people, and we might let you walk free.
So Bahri ended up working as a sniper doing extrajudicial killings for the government—yes, that government—blending state violence with cult obligations like the world’s worst side gig. It’s a deeply bleak, darkly funny twist: the dad we thought was just tired and secretive is actually carrying around literal receipts from his deal with evil.
Rini: Final Girl, But Make It National
Tara Basro’s Rini remains the emotional anchor of the series. She’s still tough, still terrified, and still absolutely refusing to lie down and let the universe steamroll her. But the stakes are bigger now: this isn’t just her family’s curse anymore. Mandara is a whole ecosystem of broken people, and the cult clearly has plans that stretch beyond one unlucky bloodline.
The beauty of her character is that she never feels like a cliché “strong female lead”—she feels like a real person who has been through way too much weirdness and just keeps going because there’s no one else. When she’s sprinting through flooded hallways and dodging corpses while trying not to lose her brothers (again), the film stays grounded in her fear, guilt, and stubbornness.
Ian, Wisnu, and the Cult of Cheerful Evil
If you thought Ian’s disappearance in the first film was tragic, Communion is here to twist that knife. When the siblings finally find him in a secret flat, he seems eerily calm, communicating via the occult sign language with Wisnu and insisting that Wisnu is his friend. It’s unsettling, even before we hit the top-floor surprise.
Because then we get to the hidden level where the cult has gathered for their “communion,” and guess who’s in charge? Ian. Tiny, deaf, disturbingly cheerful Ian, commanding hooded cult members and personally overseeing Bahri’s quartering like it’s show-and-tell day.
It’s one of the most disturbing—and darkly ironic—images in the film: the child they couldn’t save has graduated from victim to smiling priest of the very force that destroyed their lives. When Rini knocks him out mid-ritual, it’s less “hero punches evil” and more “sister desperately tackling the cosmos.”
Corpses, Communion, and the Apartment from Hell
Once the dead begin rising, Communion fully leans into big, chaotic horror. The Mandara tenants are taken out one by one, haunted by versions of themselves, the dead, and of course, Mawarni/Raminom, whose presence tilts every scene into operatic nightmare. You get screaming hallways, flooded stairwells full of bodies, and a claustrophobic sense that there is nowhere left to run that isn’t already claimed by the cult or the dead.
It’s here that Joko Anwar makes maximum use of the building as a character: it feels like a vertical haunted maze, stacked with stories, sins, and secrets. Forget cursed houses in the woods—this is tower-block terror with social housing and sacrificial rites.
Budiman: The World’s Tiredest Occult Journalist
Bless Budiman, honestly. The man has spent decades knowing way too much about this cult, watching his friend Heru spiral into suicide, and chasing half-suppressed stories while the country pretends nothing is wrong. When he finally shows up at Mandara with a gun and some partial answers, he looks like a man who is 80% courage and 20% “I am so tired of this.”
He manages to disrupt the ritual, repel Raminom, and help the kids escape by boat in flooded Jakarta—which has big “apocalypse field trip” energy. On the way out, he lays out the backstory and drops the real kicker: tonight’s horror show was just one step in a much bigger plan. So… good news, you survived. Bad news, the franchise isn’t done with you.
The Final Note: Immortal Monsters in Nice Clothes
Just when you think the film might let you breathe, we cut to Darminah and Batara—cult figures from the original film—arriving at Mandara the next day like supervisors checking on a project site. Darminah is disappointed they missed the communion; Batara assures her everything went smoothly.
Then we see the photograph of them attending the 1955 Bandung Conference, looking exactly the same as they do now. No aging, no change, just immortal evil in tailored outfits. It’s a wonderfully cold final image: the real horror isn’t just in flooded apartments and shrieking corpses. It’s the idea that the people at the top—the truly powerful—have been in the room, smiling politely, for decades.
Final Verdict: Five Flooded Floors of Terror
Satan’s Slaves 2: Communion is bigger, bolder, and messier than its predecessor, in the best way. It trades some of the first film’s focused intimacy for a sprawling, ambitious nightmare that fuses family trauma, political violence, and cult horror into one unforgettable IMAX fever dream.
The scares are sharp, the imagery lingers, and the dark humor creeps in through the sheer audacity of the premise: your dad is a government hitman for the devil, your missing little brother is now a cult leader, and your new apartment is quite literally on the communion schedule.
If this is the middle chapter of a trilogy, it’s one hell of a bridge—bloody, crowded, and absolutely not up to safety code. And honestly? I can’t wait to see what fresh generational trauma part three has planned.
