Movie Cam: Beautiful enough setting, scary enough, engaging enough acting, but minus 1 point

Tam Cam is a national fairy tale that everyone knows by heart. Turning the film version of Cam into a horror film is a curious move, but also risky because if done poorly, the audience will react.

Fortunately, the film scores points when it cleverly retells the familiar details of the fairy tale but adds a bloody revenge scene and a script full of plot twists.

Everything started thousands of years ago when a family made a deal with Bach Lao (Meritorious Artist Hanh Thuy) to gain wealth for their family and the whole village. In return, they had to sacrifice virgins to the devil who practiced the art of immortality every 10 years. In the generation of Hai Hoang (Quoc Cuong), the youngest child Cam (Lam Thanh My) was born with a deformed face. She was treated badly by both her father and mother (Thuy Diem). Only her half-sister Tam ( Rima Thanh Vy) loved Cam. The incident happened when the day of the sacrifice came and the family had no more daughters, forcing Hai Hoang to sacrifice Cam.

Refreshing a familiar fairy tale

Tam Cam is probably a fairy tale that everyone knows by heart. Not only that, the work has also appeared on stage, in commercials or even in the movie version Tam Cam: The Untold Story (2016) by Ngo Thanh Van. Everyone is familiar with the image of the gentle, kind Tam, bullied by her Stepmother and Cam. She secretly raises goby fish, wants to go to the communal house but is forced to separate the rice from the paddy. With the help of Buddha, Tam tries to be funny and becomes the Queen but is then repeatedly harmed by Cam and her mother, turning into a golden oriole, a xoan tree, a star fruit...

These familiar details all appear in Cam but are skillfully told by director Tran Huu Tan from a darker and more unusual perspective. The source seems to come from the retribution of the devil's contract that caused Cam to be born deformed. She is the neglected child, forced by her mother to choose rice. Cam tricks Tam into drowning in the pond but only to give the fish and shrimp she catches to her sister. The girl also secretly raises goby fish for company because no one dares to come near....

This is the highlight that helps the audience easily see and understand the familiar details from the story they learned and heard from their parents since childhood, but still cannot guess what will happen next. Thanks to this new way of doing things, the film has many unexpected twists, making it difficult for viewers to distinguish who is the bad guy, who is the real good guy, or what humans and demons are planning.

However, due to the ambition to build the personalities and stories of each character, Cam is somewhat long-winded and tedious. Logical errors also start from here. Many problems could have been solved very early but were ignored to create a rather forced situation of the devil taking revenge on the Hai Hoang family. When Tam returned home, she brought along many soldiers but they mysteriously disappeared when needed and then suddenly reappeared.

The personalities and psychology of the characters are sometimes very difficult to understand. For example, when Hai Hoang knew Cam was possessed by a demon, he had no specific plan. Tam, because she was gentle and loved her sister, had many incomprehensible and unreasonable actions. Director Tran Huu Tan should have cut and "uglyified" a few characters to make the work more concise.

The setting and horror elements are carefully invested.

With experience from Tet O Lang Dia Nguc and Ke An Hon, a historical horror film like Cam is probably not too difficult for producer Hoang Quan and director Tran Huu Tan. The film has a thorough investment in setting and costumes. From the house of the village chief Hai Hoang, the village of Tam and Cam or the palace of the Crown Prince (Hai Nam) are very realistically restored. The costumes of each character are imbued with Vietnamese history. Each pattern, stitch, and color scheme shows the care and meticulousness of the crew.

Many aspects of the country's folk culture are also recreated in the film, such as folk songs, nursery rhymes, and antiphonal singing between couples. Images of festivals with a series of folk games such as human chess, swinging, wrestling, and special dishes... are extremely familiar to the villages of the North.

In addition, Cam's meticulousness is also shown through the way she creates the character. Like Tet O Lang Dia Nguc and Ke An Hon, Cam's deformed face or the demonic appearance in this film are all done using makeup instead of special effects. Therefore, they look more real and terrifying. The ghosts with bloody, deformed faces combined with dim lighting and creepy sounds are enough to terrify viewers.

However, the scariest thing about Cam is the intense horror scenes. Right from the beginning, the film impressed with the image of Bach Lao eating a sacrifice alive. These scenes appeared throughout the duration with increasing frequency. The end of the film is a continuous scare and killing sequence when Cam "blackens" and harms the whole village. The deaths are all in the most horrifying way possible. Director Tran Huu Tan seems to "play to the end" with a lot of "blood and flesh", enough to haunt those with a weak heart.

Although director Tran Huu Tan has clearly improved compared to Ke An Hon, the film still has a few regrettable flaws. The film was filmed in Quang Tri and Hue. In some scenes, the villagers speak with a Central dialect. However, Hai Hoang's entire family speaks with a Southern accent while Bom speaks with a Northern accent. The dubbing of many characters causes a mood drop when the mouth shape and sound sometimes do not match. The dialogue is a confusing mix of modern and ancient. The soundtrack is not really good, sometimes it is mixed quite out of place.

Brilliant performance of Lam Thanh My and transformation of Rima Thanh Vy

Lam Thanh My is no longer a strange name to horror movie lovers. She once "caused a storm" when she had a brilliant performance in Soul Snatching (2014) when she was only 9 years old. With Cam, the actress born in 2005 once again showed that she deserves the title of "the scariest girl on Vietnamese screens". Initially, Lam Thanh My's Cam was a shy girl, always self-conscious because of her deformed face. Even though she was beaten heavily and treated cruelly, she still endured and craved her father's love. Cam was so gentle that when she was injured, her father did not give her medicine to rub it in, and her mother beat her even more but she could only cry. However, Cam did not want her father to love her and did not try to harm Tam.

However, everything changed 180 degrees when Cam was possessed by the devil. At this time, no one recognized this character anymore. The way she spoke, her voice, her eyes, her gestures, her actions were all tinged with evil. Her cruel laughter, her face that did not change color when harming people were enough to make the audience shiver. It was unbelievable that Lam Thanh My had such an excellent transformation, showing the two sides of Cam as two completely different characters.

Rima Thanh Vy's performance is equally impressive. In fact, the actress born in 1995 played a possessed girl very well in Muoi: The Curse Returns (2022). Initially, Tam had pale makeup, showing the character's simple, gentle personality. As the film progressed, she applied more lipstick and powder, along with her acting becoming sharper and more sinister until the unexpected twist came. The interaction between Rima Thanh Vy and Lam Thanh My was also very sweet, showing the extremely important sisterly affection in the plot.

The remaining famous actors in the film such as Thuy Diem, Quoc Cuong, Meritorious Artist Ngoc Hiep, Doan Hoang... all played their roles well. In fact, each character in Cam has a distinct personality. Everyone has their own story, their own thoughts and sufferings. No one is really good or bad, but just a thin line, white or black are not clear, but just a gray color that is difficult to distinguish.

The movie Cam was scrutinized by a series of horror philosophies, sales dropped seriously after 2 weeks in theaters T.P17:30:33 04/10/2024The audience is too familiar with the philosophy of good and evil, but the swap of human identities in the fairy tale of Tam Cam is important. I think everyone has a desire to overcome fate, to become a better version, especially those who are unlucky.