Ma Da: The Drowning Spirit

I did have some hope for the first Vietnamese movie that I was going to watch after 12 years or so expecting some decent filmmaking progress. Boy I shouldn't have had such high hope.

This movie has this problem that Vietnamese movies have always had: a very stiff feel to it.

The dialogues feel very unnatural with words and phrases that you will never hear actual people in the region (or almost anyone who does not exist in a book) say. It has such a pace that almost feels like they want to make sure that kids from the age of 5 can ascertain which one is the bad guy; the voice and mouth movements clearly do not match, the footstep noise and the actual footsteps do not match, every time someone takes a puff of the cigarette, hear the burning sound cutting through the air as if the your ears are 2cm from it.

It does have some okay jump scares for a typical horror. The problem is, They are the formulaic jump scares with sound effects loud enough to startle you. And unfortunately that is it. Character development feels so shallow that if you took out all the scenes that are only there to scare you or where the camera moves to spend moments on one single supposedly important detail, the movie would be left with probably about 30m runtime.

The ending was completely out of place, while the end scene tries to turn it into something else. I doubt that it makes much sense or adds anything to the story but a fleeting and forced sense of seriousness.

Maybe I'll wait another 10 years for my next Vietnamese cinematic experience.

Not at all scary like other ghost movies. The cinematography looks very virtual. The actors are all passable. My friend and I laughed all the time while watching the movie. You should just watch it as an entertaining movie, not worth expecting. The plot of the movie is very predictable, the scary scenes are not startling. And really, the editing of the scenes in the movie is very bad, the graphics are very virtual so there is no scary feeling, even the fight scenes in the movie are very fake. The movie still has a lot of flaws and many absurd details, but it seems that the audience around me quite liked this movie, and they were really startled in the movie scenes that I felt like there was nothing to be afraid of (because those details are too predictable).