The beauty queen surprised everyone by being willing to transform in her first movie. But to go further in this field, she still needs to do more character research and restraint in her acting.
Temporarily taking off her beauty queen crown, Nguyen Thuc Thuy Tien surprised everyone when she transformed into... a servant in her first film project. Lynx. In the film directed by Luu Thanh Luan, the beauty queen plays a maid named Phuong, serving the Duong Phuc family whose porcelain inlay business is famous throughout the region. The head of the family is Me Bich (Hong Dao). She has two sons.
The second son Vinh Thai's wife and children all died in an accident. Many years later, at the birthday celebration of Mrs. Bich, the third son Vinh Trong also drowned. But strangely, during the funeral, the child suddenly came back to life when a black cat jumped over the coffin.
From then on, strange things continued to happen to the family where maid Phuong served.
Thuy Tien tries hard
Producer Vo Thanh Hoa said that choosing Thuy Tien to play the role of maid Phuong was not a risky decision for the crew, nor was it a commercial trick. She had to go through casting rounds like many other candidates, and finally received his nod thanks to her talent and convincing performance. "Tien coming to Phuong is like an irreplaceable choice," Vo Thanh Hoa affirmed.
While Thuy Tien shared about the character: “I hope that with what I bring, the audience will sympathize with Phuong’s journey, a heart that has gone through many events but still believes in goodness. And then that goodness makes her doubt, and she has to fight for herself.”
Thuy Tien's role is truly the most notable "unknown factor" of the film. Lynx In fact, the plot is simple and easy to access, using ghost stories to convey the message about human karma. Behind the disaster that befell the Duong Phuc family are dirty, dark secrets that have been accumulated for a long time. And after so many years of hiding, the criminals must reap their retribution one by one.
Maid Phuong at the beginning of the film seemed to be a simple supporting character, just doing housework and taking care of Mrs. Bich attentively. However, since the Duong Phuc family encountered a disaster, the maid's presence suddenly became unusual. The question is, is Phuong simply a servant, or is she actually holding some earth-shattering secret? This is also the twist that makes the script Lynx more curious, although the mysterious events are not cleverly presented, accidentally becoming predictable, especially for audiences who love horror movies.
To be fair, Thuy Tien did a pretty good job playing the role of a maid with a mysterious origin. No one knew when Phuong first appeared in Duong Phuc. But it was not hard to see that her appearance next to Mrs. Bich, or the family members, brought about an indescribable feeling of strangeness. With a face that was half curious, worried, half as if she understood everything, the queen made the character more mysterious and attractive.
Phuong’s calmness not only makes viewers feel uneasy, but also sense a faint “taste” of danger. It is hard to know what lies behind that friendly face, when the maid has likely witnessed many crimes taking place here.
Thuy Tien, in her first foray into cinema, showed her transformation when taking on a role. Her character sometimes seemed to be docile and resigned to many harsh words, and sometimes became a clever servant who knew how to please the owner of the house and serve her own purposes.
"Stumbled" in the second half
However, due to lack of acting experience, Thuy Tien "stumbled" in the second half of the story, when the character's psychology had complex changes.
As the audience had expected, despite her status as a servant, Phuong played an important role in the knots that led to family conflicts. She was the one who led the demons to attack everyone in the house.
For the observant audience, this mystery can actually be guessed before half of the film has passed. This is largely due to the way director Luu Thanh Luan creates the plot, or uses the foreshadowing technique which is still clumsy and ineffective.
When the secret is exposed, Phuong "transforms", revealing the evil version behind the gentle, docile disguise. Phuong is the second wife, Vinh Thai's wife, who died unjustly in the past. The character's psychology is pushed to a climax when Phuong now goes crazy with anger, pain and resentment. After many years of patient waiting, what she needs is encapsulated in two words: revenge.
Thuy Tien's character is now favored with more acting space than other characters. However, the character's psychology is not mature enough, making it difficult for the film's climax to explode as expected.
In the past, Phuong was Ngoc Le's second wife, a singer who was considered a "lowly singer" by Mrs. Bich. Luckily, thanks to giving birth to a son, Le was allowed to enter the Duong Phuc family. However, she and her son were harmed by their own relatives and died tragically.
The incident caused Le, a gentle, compassionate girl who often saved people, to change 180 degrees, becoming a cruel person with endless resentment. She wanted to take revenge on the people in the Duong Phuc family, by using evil magic to kill those who had destroyed her small family. The character had a motive, but the journey of revenge was not really thorough.
Ngoc Le harbored a grudge against her sister-in-law My Kim for killing her child, but her revenge was aimed at the innocent child. Ngoc Le hated Mrs. Bich for her cruel, superstitious lifestyle and her heartless killing of her own grandchild, but in the end, she used black magic to take revenge. What the director could not explain was the character's thoughts behind that cruel choice. If it was only out of anger, Le's actions could not be completely sympathetic. Not to mention, with all that time spent infiltrating the Duong Phuc family, Ngoc Le - now a Marquis Phuong - had many opportunities to act sooner.
On the other hand, the character's interaction with the second son Vinh Thai, who is her husband, is also vague. Le may be blinded by hatred, but she cannot forget the happy times she spent with Vinh Thai. How she reacted when she saw her husband go crazy because he lost his wife and children at the same time, this question Luu Thanh Luan has not yet answered.
Because the character's psychological development path still has gaps, Thuy Tien finds it difficult to convince viewers in the climax scene. At this time, the character's pent-up resentment is not skillfully expressed. The beauty acts "blackened" with ostentatious expressions such as rolling her eyes, curling her lips or frowning, looking directly at the camera... The dialogue also shows obvious strain when the character turns evil, constantly snarling and criticizing Mrs. Bich's mother and children. Thuy Tien shows her weakness in diction, her intonation is still stiff, and she has not shown her Hue accent properly. The content of the dialogue is almost narrative and expository, which unintentionally makes the climax even more tedious.
Not to mention, the ending that the screenwriter gave to the character was also old-fashioned, not satisfying to the audience when, in the end, women were still the ones who suffered bitterly, even though they were actually just victims of male chauvinism, superstition, and heresy.
If the script was handled neatly and convincingly, while Thuy Tien restrained her expressions, the ending of Lynx perhaps less cheesy and more emotional.
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