The Curse of Glamour and the Horror of Editing
If you’ve ever wondered what would happen if The Devil Wears Prada was remade in Malaysia on a haunted shoestring budget, Susuk is your answer — and it’s every bit as confusing, campy, and unintentionally hilarious as that sounds.
Directed by Amir Muhammad and Naeim Ghalili, Susuk (which translates to “Implant”) is a supernatural morality tale about fame, beauty, and black magic. It’s a movie that wants to critique vanity and corruption but instead ends up feeling like an overlong music video directed by a philosophy student having a nervous breakdown.
By the end, you’ll be asking yourself one question: what exactly did I just watch? And possibly another: why does every character look like they’re auditioning for a ghost-themed shampoo commercial?
Plot: Fame Has a Price — and It’s Confusion
The film follows Soraya (Diana Rafar), a young nurse who’s tired of cleaning bedpans and decides she’d rather be a celebrity. Because nothing says “career transition” like jumping from hospital shifts to pop stardom via black magic.
Enter susuk — a forbidden occult practice that involves embedding charms under the skin to gain charisma, beauty, and talent. Essentially, it’s like getting a demonic facelift without the aftercare instructions.
At first, the charms work wonders. Soraya suddenly becomes confident, beautiful, and talented — which, in movie logic, means she now walks in slow motion while everyone else gawks at her like she just invented charisma.
But, as always, the deal with the devil comes with fine print. The deeper she goes into the susuk lifestyle, the more she’s drawn toward Suzana (Ida Nerina), an aging diva who’s been juicing her fame with extreme susuk keramat — a version of the charm that demands actual human lives as payment. Think Madonna meets Maleficent meets Cannibal Holocaust.
Meanwhile, a mysterious dukun (traditional witch doctor) named Dewangga lurks in the background like a gothic life coach, guiding both women down their respective paths of narcissism and necromancy.
Eventually, their stories converge in a finale so chaotic it feels like the filmmakers stuffed three endings into a blender and hit “curse smoothie.”
Two Divas, One Hot Mess
Let’s start with Soraya, our protagonist — or rather, our confused moral compass with a nervous energy that could power Kuala Lumpur. Diana Rafar’s performance is the cinematic equivalent of a deer caught in the headlights of a karaoke machine. She goes from wide-eyed innocence to full-on blood-stained glamour queen, but somehow manages to make both look equally unconvincing.
Then there’s Suzana, played with unholy camp by Ida Nerina. Suzana is what would happen if Cher made a deal with a forest demon and decided to eat her backup dancers. She’s a fading star who stays young by murdering people — which, to be fair, is basically how Hollywood works anyway.
Suzana is equal parts tragic and terrifying, but the script treats her like a melodramatic aunt who went too hard on her anti-aging routine. When she starts devouring her victims, it feels less horrifying and more like a metaphor for influencers draining the souls of their followers.
By the time Suzana and Soraya finally cross paths, you expect some kind of grand confrontation — an epic, witchy showdown drenched in moral tension. What you get instead is a dimly lit scene full of vague symbolism, erratic editing, and enough dry ice to fog up an entire Coldplay concert.
The Dukun: Part Sorcerer, Part Therapist, All Exposition
Adlin Aman Ramlie plays the dukun Dewangga with the gravitas of a man who knows his dialogue makes no sense. His job is to explain the rules of susuk, occasionally appear in visions, and stare meaningfully into the void.
He spends much of the film muttering cryptic lines like, “Beauty must feed on pain,” or “The flesh remembers what the spirit forgets,” which sound deep until you realize they’re just fancy ways of saying, “You messed up.”
Honestly, Dewangga feels less like a shaman and more like the world’s worst guidance counselor — the kind who’d tell you to “embrace your darkness” instead of helping you drop out of cursed nursing school.
Visuals: Somewhere Between MTV and a Fever Dream
Visually, Susuk is gorgeous in the way that an abandoned mall is gorgeous — glossy but empty, stylish but soulless.
The directors clearly had fun with lighting and color palettes. Every scene glows with the kind of neon decadence that screams “horror chic.” There’s a constant haze of smoke, mirrors, and glitter — like someone gave the cinematographer a fog machine and said, “Go nuts.”
Unfortunately, the editing is about as smooth as a haunted TikTok filter. Scenes jump between timelines, hallucinations, and flashbacks without warning. One minute you’re in a nightclub, the next you’re in a morgue, and suddenly someone’s eating a human heart. It’s like watching Black Swan on fast-forward while drunk on cough syrup.
Even the horror sequences, which should be shocking, are oddly sterile. Blood splatters in perfect patterns, victims die gracefully, and the scariest thing is the acting direction.
A Musical Number From Hell
Yes, there’s singing.
Suzana performs a musical number that feels like the unholy love child of a Beyoncé concert and a pagan ritual. It’s hypnotic in a “I can’t look away, but I probably should” kind of way. There’s glitz, glamour, and a palpable sense that the entire cast and crew were possessed by the spirit of bad taste.
It’s the kind of sequence where you half expect the credits to roll, only to realize you’re still trapped inside the movie.
The Message: Don’t Chase Fame (Especially if You Need Spells for It)
Susuk clearly wants to say something profound about vanity and the price of ambition. It’s a morality tale wrapped in a horror film, drenched in perfume and existential dread. The problem is, it takes itself so seriously that it loops back around to comedy.
Every time a character delivers a line about “the cost of beauty,” it’s accompanied by slow-motion hair flips and ominous chanting, like a Pantene Pro-V commercial directed by Satan.
By the end, the movie’s moral lesson — that fame destroys the soul — feels less like a warning and more like an accidental advertisement for reality TV.
Editing the Stars Away
Adding to the absurdity, several celebrity cameos were filmed and then cut in post-production. Jaclyn Victor, Waheeda, and even director Yasmin Ahmad were supposed to appear, but their scenes were deleted. You know a movie’s in trouble when even its cameos escape before release.
It’s almost poetic: a film about fame and erasure ends up erasing its own famous people.
Final Thoughts: A Pretty Corpse of a Movie
Susuk is the cinematic equivalent of a cursed beauty product — alluring packaging, intoxicating promise, but toxic on contact. It’s stylish, ambitious, and brimming with potential, but collapses under the weight of its own melodrama.
It’s too serious to be fun, too bizarre to be scary, and too slow to be profound. Yet, somehow, it’s never boring. Watching it is like attending a satanic fashion show where everyone’s forgotten the choreography but refuses to leave the runway.
At its core, Susuk is about the human desire to be seen — a fitting irony for a film that tries so hard to be noticed it loses sight of itself.
Rating: 2 out of 5 Glamorous Curses
Because beauty may be skin-deep, but this movie’s problems go straight to the bone.
