On duty: Mila (Acha Septriasa) wraps Jajang C Noer’s character with a shroud.

You usually know what to expect when you’re about to see a horror film. You expect jump scares. You wince a little at a window shot. When the horrific score — string-laden, screechy — suddenly stops, the scary stuff will come barging in.

There’s a difference between the feeling of shock and fear when you’re watching a horror film.

The most enduring horror films are the ones that thrive for the latter: George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead brought zombies into a more focused fore, Dario Argento’s Suspiria challenges the notion of the human body and Timo Tjahjanto’s Sebelum Iblis Menjemput (Before the Devil Takes) masquerades as a family drama.

Director Hadrah Daeng Ratu’s Jaga Pocong (Looking After the Pocong) does no such thing. It’s largely a mansion horror film, but Hadrah crafts the spooky ambiance of the building pretty well, adding eerie paintings and maintaining a pale-blue color palette throughout the film.

The main character, nurse Mila (Acha Septriasa), gets summoned to a mansion to care for an ailing woman (Jajang C. Noer). There she meets with Radit (Zack Lee), the woman’s son, only to find that she has died. Then, she’s tasked to bathe her, wrap her in a shroud and look after her — as a pocong (reanimated corpse wrapped in a shroud). There’s also Novi (Aqila Herby), Radit’s daughter, who wears a leg support and suffers from asthma.

Hadrah’s approach tends to zero in on the obvious. She sneaks in a reference to the Kedasih, a bird whose cuckoo is said to signal imminent death. Then, she uses an old retro-style Indonesian song to set the mood both in the mansion and in Mila’s car. A child’s innocence — an anchor for Mila’s actions (to rescue her from the pocong, for instance) — is also a motif.

Thankfully, she employs patience to kick the film into gear. It is only after the mansion’s ghastly adventure starts that the film sputters.

Caretaker: Mila (Acha Septriasa) pushes a dying child in a wheelchair in the horror film Jaga Pocong.

The mystery of the pocong is never fully explained — it just appears, with scary makeup and all. But the most unfortunate element of the movie is the logic or the twist of the ending. I won’t spoil anything, but there isn’t much of a reference to explain it (except that it’s similar to an acclaimed and popular American horror movie from last year).

Jaga Pocong has a thin story, but pretty good acting. Unfortunately, the performances are not padded by a generous script (courtesy of Aviv Elham). Acha doesn’t get to do much except be compassionate and look scared. Zack isn’t in the movie a lot but doesn’t make an impression when he does show up.

What Jaga Pocong could have done was examine Mila’s reaction in the face of oddity. Here, she is either scared or confused and nowhere in between.

Relying on the jump scares — which are alright at best — does not make for a memorable film. In the theater where I saw Jaga Pocong, many of the moviegoers were openly laughing at the film. Interestingly, they also blurted out what was going to happen and they were soon proven right.

“Why does Acha always look for trouble?” a woman sitting next to me said. No one knows, and it seems, not even the actors or filmmaker themselves.

Nurses: In Jaga Pocong, Acha Septriasa (right) plays a nurse who encounters supernatural activity.

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Jaga Pocong

(Spectrum Film, Maxima Pictures, Unlimited Production; 90 minutes;)
Director: Hadrah Daeng Ratu
Cast: Acha Septriasa, Zack Lee, Jajang C. Noer, Aqila Herby