House in the Alley (2012)

Original title: Ngôi nhà trong hem

Thao (Thanh Van Ngo, now working as Veronica Ngo, apparently) suffers through a stillbirth. The film never actually thematises this directly, but one can’t help but think the death of the child might have been avoided if her husband Thanh (Son Bao Tran) hadn’t needed to call in a mid-wife to tell him that his wife bleeding out on the bed is reason to call a doctor. But then, Thanh will turn out to be the least assertive person imaginable, unable to stand up to his horrible shrew of a mother, unwilling to face the problems of the family factory, and completely inept when it comes to even trying to help Thao through a terrible time.

And a terrible the time is. Thao is hit so hard by depression she can’t even bring herself to let her child be properly buried, so the little coffin keeps a place of honour right in the couple’s bedroom. Even Thanh’s mother realizes that this is a horrible idea. It’s an even worse idea because we are in a horror film, of course, so Thao and Thanh slowly encounter the sort of supernatural trouble you’d expect. Thao is quickly losing it completely, developing phases of violent hatred for her husband (and who can blame her?), adding symptoms of ghostly possession to those of depression. For a long time, Thanh doesn’t acknowledge the problem, being really focussed on not doing anything about the strike in the family factory as he is; indeed, neither he nor his mother apparently attempt to find out why exactly their workers are striking. Even when a group of child ghosts pushes him down a roof, and Thao really starts to need professional help (or an exorcist, or the visit to her family she asked her husband for early on but never got) he’s wavering indecisively. Only the threat of being axed by his wife can catapult him to action, it seems.

It’s a bit of a shame that so few films from Vietnam make their way to our shores. That’s not just because the more countries the merrier, but also because the dearth of films makes it difficult to parse some of the cultural context of a film like Le-Van Kiet’s House in the Alley. It’s not so much the ghosts – those are in form and function very much comparable to spooks from other South-East Asian countries – that trouble me here. Rather, it’s my complete lack of understanding for the country’s cultural norms. So I don’t know if Thanh’s extreme wet blanket style (and I’m saying that as a rather cuddly-soft guy myself) is a particular type mocked or beloved in Vietnamese art; if it’s common in the country for bourgeois types not to call in the doctor when their wife is bleeding out on the bed (how are emergency services in the country?); if the film’s audience reads the characters in a comparable way I do; or even if most of the characters’ horrible ways to treat a woman who is obviously suffering is something that’s culturally expected or deplored. Given my lack of context, it’s rather difficult to parse more than the most basic of the psychological elements of the film. Clearly, it’s a film about a couple’s trouble moving on from a stillbirth as expressed through spookery but how the film actually judges their behaviour, I don’t feel in a proper position to understand.


What I can understand are the more direct horror elements. These are, unfortunately, not as interesting or exciting as I would have wished for. Ngo is certainly able to sell Thao’s depression and the changes brought on her by the supernatural influence on the couple’s home, but I never really found myself frightened or creeped out by her suffering for most to the time. Even when she starts to grab an axe and go after Thanh, the film’s much too polite about it, Kiet’s direction never really bringing out the tension or the emotional horror of the situation beyond the most obvious. The ghosts, for their part are not terribly impactful either. Again, the film seems rather reluctant to actually make them feel threatening or creepy; it’s just too polite for even a little jump scare here and there.