Time for V-Horror?
Vietnam officially boards the SEA-horror train and shows the other passengers what that should look like.
Phi Phong: The Blood Demon
Director: Đỗ Quốc Trung • Writer: Đỗ Quốc Trung
Starring: Kiều Minh Tuấn, Minh Anh, Diệp Bảo Ngọc, Ngô Phạm Hạnh Thúy
Vietnam • 2hrs
Opens Hong Kong September 10 • IIB
Grade: B-
Southeast Asia is having real a horror moment. Like the J-horror and K-horror, ghost-based movement of the 1990s and 2000s, SEA filmmakers are tapping into a long, rich, deep vein of folklore, myth and superstition that’s ripe for the terror picking. Actually, check that. SEA-horror is having a moment beyond its borders. Artists have been exploring and exploiting their folk legends for decades; Mae Nak Phra Khanong was produced in Thailand in the late 1950s. It’s just recently they’ve been welcomed onto the cool kids’ festival stages. Most recently Wregas Bhanuteja’s Levitating and Edwin’s Sleep No More from Indonesia, In My Mother’s Skin by Kenneth Dagatan from the Philippines, Tha Rae: The Exorcist (Taweewat Wantha, Thailand) and Emir Ezwan’s Roh from Malaysia spring to mind.
Vietnam is most definitely in the mix, or at least it aims to be. It may not be the first film in this sub-genre, but Đỗ Quốc Trung’s Phi Phong: The Blood Demon | Phí Phông: Quỷ Máu Rừng Thiêng is the most polished and ready for prime time. The film about a brother-sister shaman duo who head into Vietnam’s mountainous north to find their mother and wind up helping a village banish a phi phong (everyone in that part of the country knows what that is) has been a massive hit at home, racking up VND200 billion (about HK$60 million) and now creeping into overseas markets. Easy to see why. Korean film giant CJ Entertainment had a hand in making The Blood Demon, so high production values are assured, and above all writer-director Đỗ makes the folklore and mythology feel lived-in and mundane in an everyday kind of way. The rituals aren’t fetishised; the beliefs aren’t wacky. They’re part of life in this village and their fundamental ordinariness is what buoys the story. It’s a shame it loses its way.
So this is a sigil
The Blood Demon opens with a trio of shamans in a cave, conjuring spirits and trying to trap a demon inside some kind of barrier in order to protect what at first blush appears to be a random village nearby. The demon is a phi phong, a shapeshifting creature that blends in with the rest of us and survives by eating blood. One of the trio is attacked and possessed by this demon – immediately after it kills the village’s shaman leader. When city shaman Con (Kiều Minh Tuấn) and his spirit-seeing sister Dương (Minh Anh) get a phone call about the sick woman, it turns out it’s their mother (Ngô Phạm Hạnh Thúy), and off they go to the northern highlands to collect her and bring her home. That doesn’t go so well; the woman is trapped in the village by various unseen forces and when she tries to leave bad shit happens. And speaking of bad shit, just after Con and Dương arrive a series of grisly murders breaks out, which for no real reason the villagers blame first on Con and Dương and then OG outsider Mon (Diệp Bảo Ngọc) and her Damien-esque daughter Lua (Nina Nutthacha Jessica Padovan).
DOP Fa Châu Trần makes the most of the misty mountain location and imposing natural landscapes, bathing the images in concealing murk that screams “buried secrets” and looming atonement. He also drops more than a few creative compositions and manifests the spirits in hard black and white in a clever switch. When shit gets real in Act 2 the monochrome contrasts nicely with the green of the physical village, which itself embodies its residents’ stagnation resulting from those secrets. It’s retro yet modern, with lots of lanterns and thatched roofs rather than LED lights and brick – but there’s a fine line between traditional and stuck in a rut.
There’s also a fine line between dense mythology and convoluted and unwieldy, and unfortunately Đỗ comes down on the wrong side of it. In his attempt to draw parallels between the cursed village and its secret shame and the family bonds at the heart of the story, and then toss in some metaphors about how we show the world what we want it to see and not what we really are, The Blood Demon sags in the middle under the weight of too many layers of story and too many revelations. Đỗ tries hard but he can’t keep the threads woven together and clearly defined at the same time, and every effort to do so adds five minutes to a run time that’s already too long. Then there’s the hyper-drama of the finale that most horror hounds will see coming a mile away – even with twist upon turn upon sudden discovery. At some point you will lose track of the phi phong. But the film does have a lot going for it, and there’s some good gore and a few creative deaths, but there are also some clichés that really need to die. Does the village elder always have to be a perv? Đỗ is a relatively young filmmaker with one other feature credit to his name (a drama about a circus performer!) so where he goes next is anyone’s guess. Based on this, hopefully it’s back to the horror space.