This new mystery-thriller by genre maestro Kiet Le-Van is a modern Vietnamese adaptation of Dostoevsky’s novella ‘A Gentle Creature’. A young and beautiful woman, Linh, commits suicide. As Thien, the now widower husband, sits by Linh’s dead body we see how they met, married, and why Linh was unable to handle Thien’s lifestyle through flashbacks. A pawnshop owner Thien marries Linh and takes the parentless girl away from her abusive aunt. After the marriage, Linh finds it harder and harder to handle her husband’s constant watching and control. When she starts to obsess over going to church, the relationship between the two ends in tragedy. The structure of characters in the film is quite simple: poor orphan girl, abusive relatives, obsessive, control-freak husband, cold bystander in the butler. But the film captures the hard-boiled nature of the modern life through the cold-blooded capitalists whose only obsession is money and the tragedy of a woman who dies slowly between them. The film manages to deliver genre intensity towards the end?representative of Vietnamese genre film today. (Minah JEONG)