Roh

• Roh was Malaysia's official submission for Best International Feature Film at the 93rd Academy Awards (2021) — it didn't land a nomination, but remains one of the rare horror films the country has ever submitted for Oscar consideration.
• It was shot in about two weeks in the Dengkil forest south of Kuala Lumpur on a budget of roughly RM360,000 (about $88,500 USD) — not the RM1.2 million figure sometimes floated for it.
• Director Emir Ezwan came up as a visual-effects artist — he was VFX supervisor on Crossroads: One Two Jaga — before making his feature debut with Roh, and deliberately kept the effects unflashy, leaning on the real jungle location to do the scaring instead of CGI.
• The film opens with a Quranic epigraph about Iblis, tipping its hand early that the story's evil is a demonic entity that possesses rather than merely haunts.
• Roh swept the 31st Malaysia Film Festival, winning six awards including Best Film, Best Screenplay, and Best Supporting Actress.

The demon never has to force its way in — it's invited twice. First as Adik, the pitiful, silent girl the family takes pity on and feeds; then, once she's dead and buried, as Tok, the authoritative old woman who shows up offering help. Each form matches exactly what a starving, isolated family would let through the door. By the time Tok reveals what she really is, she's already used up every ounce of trust this family had left to give.

The mother's unraveling doesn't start with Tok's visit — her wrist-slitting and rapidly declining state by the film's end suggest she was already breaking down from grief and isolation well before the old woman ever showed up. Tok doesn't create the family's vulnerability; she just finds the crack that was already there and widens it.

Burying Adik's body themselves is the moment the family actually loses — that's when Tok gets her real foothold, through Along. The fire at the end isn't random or accidental: it's Tok closing the loop, using the last surviving family member to erase every witness to what happened out in that clearing.

In a remote Malaysian jungle, a widow named Mak raises her two children, Along and Angah, in a crumbling shack when a filthy, mute girl wanders into their clearing. They take her in and feed her — the next morning she's eating a raw bird, and she warns the family they'll all be dead by the next full moon before slitting her own throat. The family buries her and tries to move on, but a strange old woman calling herself Tok starts turning up with cryptic warnings, and a hunter comes looking for the girl who's already dead. What's actually stalking this family was never in the ground where they left it — it's an iblis working through whatever body will let it in, and by the time the truth comes out, it's already won. Roh is rural Malay folk horror at its most elemental: nobody's coming to help, the forest is hungry, and the thing hunting you might already be wearing someone you trust.