Levitating2026

something genuinely rare here. rare in the sense that it lifts up a local tradition, a communal possession ritual rooted in cultures  treats it as a living, breathing source of joy. it's a gift. every time the possession sequences happen, there's this electric, sweaty, deeply human energy to them. the film kept reminding me of two things; Kucumbu Tubuh Indahku, that same quality of the body as political territory, tradition as resistance, identity as something worth fighting for with your whole chest. but more than anything, Princess Mononoke. the allegory sits in the same water. capitalism arrives with its permits and its machinery and its security uniforms. Wanaria as the industrial force of erasure, and the spirits as the forest striking back. and there's Bayu's spirits; bulus, kutu, lintah. dismissed early as weak, embarrassing, small. and by the end, those are the ones that save everyone. and lintah, the leech, becomes the most devastating force in the entire film. the dialect situation is a mess and i'm not going to be polite about it. in a film this specifically rooted in place and tradition, the linguistic texture matters enormously. and what we get is a scrambled inconsistent blend of accents that dont settle anywhere.  but the ending is where i have to sit down and look you in the eye. the Wanaria security forces are the boots of capital, the faces of coercion, the people who spent this entire film being the physical instrument of erasure against these villagers... are forgiven. excused, really. maybe they had families. maybe they had no choice. maybe they were just workers too, trapped in the same system. and i understand the impulse, intellectually. i've had that conversation. i've sat with that complexity. why why did this film pulled its punch precisely when the punch mattered most. it is, in the most literal sense, anti-anarchist, in a way that feels like someone got nervous. like someone in a room somewhere said "we can't end it like that." and so they didn't. Para Perasuk is about letting the past possess you vs letting it move through you. about how grief becomes a haunting when you can't release it. about how a whole community can be crushed under the weight of something unresolved. and kerasukan, the act of being entered, of surrendering control temporarily, becomes not a loss of self but a path back to it. there's something almost unbearably tender about a tradition whose entire purpose is to give people happiness. happiness. when did you last see a film that trusted joy as a legitimate spiritual destination.