Kieu

I thought the producer made a huge mistake when she decided to tear apart from the original story of Kieu and decided to add a twisted version of her own. The original story of Kieu was a story about women's oppressive role in its time. Kieu is a talented and beautiful girl in the literature that fell into ill fate and was sold into prostitution, betrayed by her lovers, and was not able to fight her destiny. The ghost in the literature had a one-time encounter with Kieu; she too was ill-fated and wanted to warn Kieu of the events to come. HOWEVER, this movie is about a the bitterness of women jealousy, which made all the characters look weak and so minimized the powerful message from the original text, for those who were a fan of Kieu the original text would find this movie extremely disappointing as none of the characters were properly develop. Overall, was a really bad movie.

The basic story is really compelling and has some unexpected, riveting twists. The production design reminds of classical wuxia-movies, but when it comes to cgi the smaller budget gets clearly visible.

The bigger problems are a) the sometimes really bad acting b) the sometimes confusing edtiting c) a somehow disconnected ghost story d) a massive pile of kitsch that is nearly killing the movie right in the middle. If they had spared some of those scenes, they would have had more time to let some of the really interesting characters unfold some more.

Summing it up: If you can endure mediocre asian kitsch you are rewarded with an really extraordinary story that takes some time to evolve and show its potential.