Detective Kien: The Headless Horror

Victor Vu knows how to make a good movie. Detective Kien: The Headless Horror is his 18th film and he shows no signs of slowing down. The seasoned director is the most prolific filmmaker in Vietnam and his films, including his box office record-breaking latest release, capture his audience. Detective Kien, much like his previous The Last Wife, plays with genre to sample nearly every relevant human emotion in storytelling, albeit the two work in entirely different genres. There is something there for everyone. 

Detective Kien starts as a ghost story, but it never truly embraces its more spooky side. The title doesn’t lie. This is a detective story first, a romance second, and a ghost story third. Set during the Nguyen Dynasty, community outsider and renowned detective Kiên (Quoc Huy) investigates the disappearance of a young woman from a rural village. She’s not the first to disappear. Disappearance and possible killings aren’t exactly rare in this community. The villagers believe themselves to be the victims of the drowning demon, a monstrous water entity that leaves its victims headless. But the disappeared woman’s aunt, Miss Moon (Dinh Ngọc Diệp, also known as Ngọc Diệp), suspects foul play. She does not think a supernatural force killed her niece. Detective Kiên, somewhat refreshingly for a Sherlock-type, keeps an open mind about demonic forces and the more plausible human-driven causes. 

The period element adds a populist flair to the mystery thriller. It’s a period in history that will be, I imagine, cinematically unfamiliar to most non-Vietnamese audiences. Sometimes the filmmakers of period concepts from relatively smaller national cinemas can be tempted by cheap sets and kitschy props that instantly ruin the period feel. But everything here feels like it really could be from 200 years ago. And sometimes, it is! According to the press notes, they shot in villages and homes that are actually 200 years old. The costume designs do a lot of heavy lifting too and deserve their due. One’s social class is instantly recognizable from their clothes, and social class is very near to the heart of Detective Kien. 

It may be a period piece, but Vu’s latest is not stuck in the past. As the mystery unfolds, so do narratives of corruption, injustice, and iniquitous leaders. Several of the most popular Letterboxd reviews reference Scooby Doo and while the comparison is a little too cute for my own experience with Detective Kien, there is something about the shared disdain for local mysteries masking corruption that is spot on in the allusion. I was personally much more reminded of the Chinese film series Detective Dee, particularly the three films directed by Tsui Hark. The similar titles make the comparison pretty easy, but so do the genre-bending and historical settings. Tsui Hark’s trilogy depends a lot more on CGI and digital cinema and is also more committed to action cinema than Detective Kien’s more sparse stuntwork and tangibility. 

The two films I have seen from Vu’s enormous filmography are both period pieces filled with lush cinematography and beautiful people. Ugly people don’t exist in his worlds, for better and worse. Even the peasants look like models. In part for the beautiful people and in larger part because of the camera work, Detective Kien is a very pleasant film to look at. The colors pop and the lighting dramatically contrasts. Vu and cinematographer Dominic Pereira (who also worked on The Last Wife) balance nature and human communities in their images quite intentionally too. Natural green scenery builds the background of his village scenes and traces of human life dot his wildernesses. Perhaps there is an interesting thesis behind this about humans’ being just another part of a larger eco-system, an eco-system of life and death that is always operating, even if just on the peripheries. Even if this isn’t the case, the divergence of the natural and artificial makes for an exceptional photographic subject. Everything is beautiful and sometimes that’s what mainstream films need: a good eye for beauty.