Ignored, resentful and sad, the ‘middle-aged woman’ can also redeem herself as the heroine of her life. Combining the genres of fantasy and horror with a comic drama as its base, Vietnamese film Don’t Cry, Butterfly is a quirky film that puts women who have been denigrated as ‘middle-aged women’ to the forefront. Tam is an ordinary middle-aged woman. She witnesses her husband’s infidelity and turns to voodoo to try and win back her cheating husband’s heart. Tam’s house, which is haunted by the ‘spirit of the house’, soon becomes a place for social experimentation and a space for the genre to unfold. Unlike her mother’s generation, who cope with their real-life struggles by reconciling them with a fantasy world, Tam’s daughter Ha takes a different path. For Ha, home is no longer a place to be adapted through feng shui and witchcraft, but a place to either leave or change. It is ultimately the contrast between the two women, mother and daughter, that adds taut tension to the film. (LEE Hwajung)