May the Devil Take You

• Timo Tjahjanto made his name as one half of the Mo Brothers with Kimo Stamboel (Macabre, Killers, Headshot), but May the Devil Take You was his first feature film directed solo — and it won him the Maya Award for Best Director in 2019.
• The film had its North American premiere at Fantastic Fest 2018 in Austin — the same edition that screened Tjahjanto's action bloodbath The Night Comes for Us, giving him two features at one festival.
• Tjahjanto has openly called the film his love letter to Sam Raimi's Evil Dead — critics clocked the geysers of black goo and demonic chaos as pure Raimi, filtered through Indonesian supernatural folklore.
• The possession effects are mostly practical — white-eyed demon makeup, contorted body movement, and gallons of black bile — a hands-on approach reviewers consistently singled out.
• Netflix picked up international distribution outside Indonesia, giving the film a far wider global audience than most Indonesian genre releases get.
• A sequel, May the Devil Take You Too, hit Indonesian theaters in February 2020 and landed on Shudder later that year — also directed by Tjahjanto, who has said a Chapter Three is in development.

The devil's contract operates as a metaphor for inherited wealth built on exploitation — Lesmana's fortune literally costs his children their flesh, suggesting that dirty money eventually devours the next generation regardless of innocence.

Alfie's mother Intan died in what everyone wrote off as suicide — but the film reveals it was part of the curse. The theory goes further: she was the pact's first payment, and the stepfamily all showing up at the villa at once isn't coincidence but the devil's design, gathering every bloodline tied to the contract in one place for collection night.

The devil here isn't chaotic evil — it's a creditor enforcing terms Lesmana signed. The whole haunting runs on contract logic: payment owed, collateral seized, collection enforced. Read that way, the horror is fundamentally about debt — dirty money as a loan the next generation gets stuck repaying.

Alfie's estranged father Lesmana built his fortune the old-fashioned way — a blood pact with a demon, brokered through black magic. But the money's long gone, and now he's wasting away in a hospital bed from an illness no doctor can name. When Alfie and her stepfamily converge on his abandoned villa to hunt for whatever's left of the estate, they crack open a sealed basement where the ritual went down — and something's been waiting in the dark for the bill to come due. What starts as a family squabble over assets spirals into a night of demonic possession, body horror, and a desperate scramble to sever Lesmana's infernal contract before the devil collects every soul on the ledger — including Alfie's little half-sister Nara.