Rating: 3/5
Hooptober X | 1/34 | Countries 1/6 | Vietnam
Vietnam 1953 We begin with a cold open to Linh walking into a bedroom and witnessing a bloody body — the police take her to the station for questioning, and she gives her story
She could find no available jobs — she had worked on her family’s farm, but an air raid took her family and farm. So, she walked 40 km from her village to apply to be a servant at So-Car Estate, a French rubber plantation
After receiving the position, Linh befriends the cook, who tells her she has made a mistake coming — that this estate has a history of hundreds of servants dying (predominantly Vietnamese), their bodies buried in unmarked graves beneath the rubber trees
The cook also tells a story about the former mistress of the house, who drowned her baby in the tub and, out of guilt, walked to the lake and drowned herself
Captain Laurent, the master of the house, returns from war with a bullet wound — the house assigns Linh to help him recover. As she does, the two fall for each other and begin a secret affair — secret to the house and Laurent’s fiancée Madeleine
It is then that the ghost of the mistress returns to exact her revenge
The house itself is gothic and full of shadows, especially when Linh walks the halls at night by oil lamp
The music and sound are over-the-top, never letting a single moment go unscored or pushing jump scare sounds even if you don’t see anything
Taking place near the end of the First Indochinese War, the film encouraged me to read more about French Indochina and how the Geneva Agreements that granted sovereignty to Vietnam from France also led to the Vietnam War
The historical horror seems to be heavily influenced by Guillermo Del Toro, especially The Devil’s Backbone
The film itself functions as a (not so subtle) metaphor for the French occupation and the turn that the war was taking at the time
Overall, this is a decently constructed movie — a “wow them in the end” finale that paves over some of the internal inconsistencies