Daydreamers

This was a film that I got the chance to see thanks to Laura from Cultivate IPG who sent over the press release. Figuring out that this was a foreign horror film getting its wide release in 2025 thanks to Dark Star pictures made it enough to check it out for review. It is movies like this that help to round out my end of year list with variety. Other than that, I knew this was a vampire film from Vietnam and that intrigued me even more.

Synopsis: revolves around a familiar legend that ancient vampires hunted humans and ended up being mostly destroyed. The living individuals will cluster together, setting a rule to not kill people so they can live safely. That is until a younger group tries to reclaim supremacy.

We start this movie off with learning more about the legend from the synopsis. Vampires originated in Europe. They were hunted so they fled to Asia. This happened 400 years ago. They decided that they wouldn't feed on humans so they could blend in. This peace has been kept for years. Their leader is Trieu (Chi Pu).

This then shifts over to meeting the key players. There is Nhat (Tran Ngoc Vang). He grabs a rat but stops himself. He is then called into a room. There is a woman who is telling a legend about the first monk who became a vampire. He decided to stop feeding and with sheer power of will, was able to cure his thirst. That allowed him to walk in the daylight again. Now this woman who is telling this is Vy (Thien Tu). She turns out to be Nhat's mother. Also, there is his brother, Marco (Thuan Nguyen). What we see happening here is that blood is poured into a cup. A bunch of people are chained to the wall. If they turn, a man helping shoots that person. Let me also say here, this man doesn't seem to be a vampire for something we see later. He does call Vy mother as well.

Now things become complicated when Marco and Trieu fall in love, or at least that's who I think he falls for. They start to become reckless and kill. A young woman is attacked, with a great scene where we see her looking in her mirror. These two hang out with a group of vampires as well.

We also see that Nhat is a nice guy. He makes deliveries. There is a young woman being bullied, Ha (Trinh Thao). He helps her. They end up running into each other later when she is with her friend, Mai (Ngan Hoa). This puts a chain of events into motion that will change everything and the ways of life for everyone.

That is where I'll leave my recap and introduction to the characters. Where I want to start is that this is a wild film. It feels inspired by story elements and visuals from countries that surround Vietnam. This also gives me my first film from this country that I've seen. I'm now up to having seen movies from 70 different countries at the time of writing this review. Quite interesting that going by features, there are only 614 from this country according to Letterboxd and only 66 in the horror genre. The reason I'm bringing this up is that it is made well for such a newer country for filmmaking.

Now that I have that information out of the way, let's delve more into what we're getting here. Vampires are interesting creatures to explore, because they are one of the earliest monsters to be portrayed on the screen. It also has so much lore out there that differs from film to film, country to country. I do like this idea that vampires fled to Asia due to being killed off in Europe. They saw the writing on the wall so they adapted to survive. We are now seeing this newer group of vampires that are breaking the laws. This will lead me to the first theme that I saw and that is class.

There are a couple ways of looking at this. The first is that when we first see Marco and Trieu, they're a fancy place. It is interesting here that we see that a section of vampires has amassed great wealth. At this place, a woman cuts her finger which leads to our creatures losing control and massacring them. That's another of the levels to this. Vampires feed on humans so they now see themselves as superior. They are in some ways. There are also examples where they are living peasant lives as well. I like seeing a cross-section here, that there are rich and poor on both sides.

The next ones I'm going to lump together. The title comes from the group of vampires who want to walk in the sun again. They're considered 'daydreamers', which I thought was clever. Nhat delivers food to people that live around him. He then falls in love with Ha. He doesn't want to turn her when he's pressured to. He craves to be human again and seeks that connection with her. It is an interesting dichotomy that Marco has this group that he hangs out with, but they turn on each other when things get difficult. Marco and Nhat also butt heads while still loving each other. There are good emotions that develop here.

What I think helps here is the acting. Vang is good as our lead character. I like that he's a reluctant vampire. He wants to be human again and doesn't want to kill. He is even demanded to turn Ha but refuses since he doesn't want to drink blood. Nguyen is good at the opposite end of the spectrum. He's embraced being this monster. I like having these two as brothers, since they do have love despite their polar opposite personalities. Thao is good as Naht's love interest. Their feelings create much larger issues across both the human and vampire worlds. Pu and the rest of the vampires are good as well. They help push everything to where it ends up.

All that is left then is filmmaking. The cinematography and framing here are great. This captures the natural beauty of where this is set. I like that we get sequences in the city and then ones that are outdoors. The scenes by the river and the boat are good too. They frame things with mirrors well to go along with this. What I like there is that the vampires don't cast reflections and how they use that was good, especially early on for an attack scene. There is a combination of practical and computer effects. This uses wire work to bring things to life. Since we have supernatural entities, that makes sense. The computer generated things were hit or miss. I like what they do with vampire eyes, but there were others with blood spray that weren't as good. The soundtrack and design were good as well.

In conclusion, this is a solid first film for me to see outside of Vietnam. Being that it is using vampires as its creature can be something difficult to do since at this point it needs to do something different. It borrows from a handful of different sources, but visually this is well-done. That helps to set it apart in my eyes. It feels like the Hong Kong/Chinese films with people flying around. It makes sense here using supernatural beings. I also like the social commentary and themes that are meshed in without being in your face. Now this does run too long, around 2 hours. This still was an interesting watch and I'd recommend it if you like foreign vampire films.

My Rating: 7 out of 10.

The movie has a lot of influence of american cinema...from The Lost Boys, to Twilight or even Blade... to be honest, there's a lot to go around, a lot to handle, but still, there are a lot of very nice scenes, styllish action scenes.

There are some scenes were I felt a bit confused, because the subtitkes were poorly made, and weren't much help.

I think I'm going to try and see it again, with a bit more attention, so that the loose ends here and there, tie up... The combat is filmed in a styllish fashion, but the choreography is a bit amateur, and weird, almost stiff.... Still, try it...probably you won't be surprised but it will be entertaining enough...