previously published on Asian Movie Pulse
The vampire trope in movies is almost as old as the art of cinema itself. They are invented as something foreign, exotic, usually quite elite that does not belong to the “ordinary world”. There are, however, numerous variations regarding their lore, so we, for instance, got an action hero who was born as vampire and grew to look like Wesley Snipes in his prime or a glittery day-walking, self-loathing highschool kid seeking for some sort of redemption in a soap opera masked as a saga. The point is that the vampires are tough to pin down (pun intended!) because one can vary the rules and the cosmology so much. Vietnamese filmmaker Timothy Linh Bui tried to do so in “Daydreamers” and, after a promising start, failed.
The start is actually an animated sequence set against a voice-over narration which explains how we got such a chic European phenomenon in Vietnam. The answer is, of course, colonialism and debauchery that ensued. The people rebelled soon afterwards (see another parallel with the Vietnamese 20th century history) and chased the vampires into the illegal. The remaining ones either blended with humans or went to live in the wild, but they had to obey the law that forbade them to taste human blood hoping that the diet of animal blood and humane approach would grant them redemption.
Unfortunately, that cheeky anti-colonial angle stays locked in the first sequence of the film, as the filmmaker and his co-writer Doan Si Nguyen decided to tell a “contemporary” story about what happens when the law gets broken. The story revolves around two brothers, Marco (Thuan Nguyen) and Nhat (Tran Ngoc Vang), a young mortal woman, Ha (Trinh Thao) taken to the vampire underground, and the struggle for power between the “humanist” and “anarchist” fractions within the vampire clique ruled by the benevolent “queen” Trieu (Chi Pu).
Basically, what we get is a one season of a vampire-laced soap opera squeezed in a two-hour movie that feels both rushed and lagging. The trouble is not that Timothy Linh Bui does not understand the concept of vampires and their symbolism, because he apparently does, but the fact that he takes his story way too seriously, but without employing the right means to tell it compellingly.
His directing style is either completely plain in more ordinary, clearly dialogue-driven scenes, or hyper-stylized in the action ones, but the style he goes for is simply derived from video-clips or computer games. Everything is overdone, from the lighting, the abundant use of cheap visual effects (the supervisor Nguyen Anh Viet is signed pretty high up on the ending credits, which is significant) all the way to the omnipresence of music, alternating between the otherwise decent neoclassical score by Jérôme Leroy and MiSS NiNE’s electronic loops. The same goes for acting, which is constantly in the over-expressive register, often over the limit of theatrics, which is not the fault of the actors themselves, as they are instructed to go all in all the time. Maybe some of the saving grace could be found in the attempts of the DoP Phu Nam to capture an occasional eye candy of a shot or the editors Dat Tran and Pham Quoc Dung to calm the things down by delaying their chops, but there is only so much they can do.
Eventually, “Daydreamers” is a trash movie, which might be legitimate if it would be a conscious decision by its director to make it exactly that way. Unfortunately, this is not a case here, as the whole trash seems quite involuntary, as a by-product of a combination of high ambition and sloppy execution.