A girl in torn clothes and with a bloody face stands hesitantly on edge of a bridge. Shaking, she clings to a doll used for shamanistic rituals. Tears roll down her face, mixing with the blood, and she finally makes the decision to throw herself into the water.
At the opening of a temple, the shaman Linh gives praise to the real-estate entrepreneur Huy for his donation; the latter is present at the ceremony with his wife Diep and their six-year-old daughter Ai. Diep’s daughter from her first marriage arrives at the ceremony late, her uncle Thuc accompanying her into the temple. When Ai asks to go to the bathroom, her mother asks Chi to take her. When the two exit the temple, Ai catches a batrachian; when she shows it to Chi, the latter begins to retch, a clear symptom of a secret pregnancy. As Chi vomits, Ai walks away and heads towards the river, which runs nearby. A doll under the grate of a drain catches her eyes. But when the little girl tries to get it, a presence drags her into the water. Unaware of what has happened, Chi returns to the temple, but the little girl’s mother immediately asks her where her step-sister is. The girl’s disappearance sets in motion an intense wave of family dramas, other-world possessions and secrets that cannot be confessed…
After having directed an ambitious, melodramatic epic on the experiences of the South Vietnamese after the fall of Saigon and their immigration to the USA with Journey from the Fall (2006), and a popular rom-com, How to Fight in Six Inch Heels (2013), the Vietnamese-American Ham Tran makes a successful stab at raising the bar for the quality of Vietnamese horror films with his third feature film. Hollow boasts excellent production techniques, with very effective sound and visuals, on a par with the best of the genre hailing from Thailand or Hong Kong. From the very first ‘backward’ frame, Tran shows his superiority compared to other local productions of this ilk. At times, he goes overboard, going to the other extreme, almost for the sake of it; but the aesthetic style remains praiseworthy.
And his orchestration of the various expressive components, especially the sound and cast (impeccable, including the young actress playing the terrifying role of Ai, Thanh My), reveals potential that, bar a few exceptions (the incidental music is far too invasive and, frankly, not very original), not only manages to keep the tension high, but also introduces a multi-layered thematic-symbolic structure.
But Hollow’s place in the honours list of Vietnamese horror is not only due to its technical prowess. The screenplay, written by Tran with Kasia Ancuta, is full of terrifying twists and turns, while managing to gravitate around a powerfully symbolic issue: maternity. On the one hand, Chi, who dreams of going abroad to study, has to face an unwanted pregnancy, on the other, Diep, torn between two daughters of different fathers, reveals to her that the fact that she had her so early in life (at 19) did not dash her dreams for the future; the non-leading roles include mothers on the brink of insanity or back from the dead, all with exclusively female offspring. And we also have the image of Huy feeding the diabolical crocus plant eggs, which it feeds on, leaving just the empty shell. The stones Huy collects are also hollow, but the space is filled with crystals formed by trapped gases. Without giving away any spoilers, the real backbone of the film is the complicated relationship between the female and the male (a certain kind of symptomatically ‘deviant’ male).
A noteworthy point is that, due to censorship issues, the version released in Vietnam is different from the film shown in the rest of the world; in its homeland, the entire story takes place in a ‘dream’ of Chi’s.