* Note: The article reveals the movie's content.
"Ghost" is the latest horror movie by director Nguyen Huu Hoang, inspired by the folk horror legend of "ghost pulling sausage" in the river area.
After less than a week of release, as of the morning of August 21, the film has brought in more than 67 billion VND in box office revenue (according to Box Office Vietnam ). However, the work cannot avoid weaknesses and content gaps that leave the audience not truly satisfied.
Red dress witch
In "Ma da", the character Nhung (Da Chuc) begins to notice strange phenomena when she accidentally picks up an old doll along the river. Nhung constantly had a creepy feeling, hearing a call and the figure of a strange woman following her.
When scared to tell the story to her mother ( Viet Huong ), Nhung referred to the woman as "the girl in the red dress". When in reality, all the audience sees is a female ghost with messy hair and her whole body covered in dirty black mud.
The image of the girl in red holding a grudge and jumping into the river to commit suicide appeared briefly in the stories of local people. However, the ghost did not appear with this appearance to scare everyone afterward.
Nhung's story left the audience wondering. Is what the girl sees completely different from the audience's perspective?
Adult indifference
The film is set in a village in the Western region of the river. When Hoang (Hoang Meo), a fisherman, suddenly drowned in the night, villagers spread rumors and feared the ghost's return. However, it seems that no one cares about the children.
In most scenes, the children in the village often go to school and come home together without adult supervision or supervision. Even when she came home late, moving through the forest at night, Nhung was only led home by Hieu (Duy Anh), a boy a few years older than her.
Or when Nhung was afraid to tell her mother about a strange woman following her and inviting her to go out with her, Mrs. Le expressed a rather indifferent attitude and only told her child not to follow strangers.
Foreign objects in between the body's toes
In "Ma da", the character Mr. Tu, played by actor Trung Dan, is revealed to be a person who once worked as a fisherman like Ms. Le. Because he could not save his wife and children, Mr. Tu decided to quit his job and live while doing autopsies at the morgue.
After Hieu died from drowning, Mr. Tu accidentally found a strange object that looked like a coin between his toes. Seeing that, Mr. Tu appeared thoughtful.
However, in the entire later part of the work there is no mention of this. Where does that object come from and what is its role?
In fact, the coin is also the key factor that helps Nhung and her child expel the ghost from their bodies. However, those are the coins and methods that Mr. Tu has acquired after many years of practicing collecting bodies floating in the river.
Silhouette of authorities
Police forces often appear in Vietnamese horror movies to "clean up the mess" and solve problems at the last minute. However, in "Ma da", the audience wondered when there was absolutely no sign of the authorities on duty.
From the scenes of finding dead bodies floating in the river, taking the bodies to the morgue are all handled by the people themselves. Or when Ms. Hanh (Cam Ly) and Ms. Le discovered their child was missing, they also decided to search for it themselves, even searching for many days without reporting to the police so that the authorities could assist.
Many people believe that this is a rather illogical situation, especially when it has not been determined whether the missing person actually drowned or fell into the water by accident or was murdered or arrested...
In addition, "Ma Da" has many holes in the content such as the shaman's ( Thanh Loc ) careless death, Mrs. Le's clean but full of worms bowl of rice at the end of the film... However, the work still works. satisfied many audiences thanks to the good acting of female lead Viet Huong, the suspenseful pace of the film, many sensational scenes...
