I thought the producer made a huge mistake when she decided to tear apart from the original story of Kieu and decided to add a twisted version of her own. The original story of Kieu was a story about women's oppressive role in its time. Kieu is a talented and beautiful girl in the literature that fell into ill fate and was sold into prostitution, betrayed by her lovers, and was not able to fight her destiny. The ghost in the literature had a one-time encounter with Kieu; she too was ill-fated and wanted to warn Kieu of the events to come. HOWEVER, this movie is about a the bitterness of women jealousy, which made all the characters look weak and so minimized the powerful message from the original text, for those who were a fan of Kieu the original text would find this movie extremely disappointing as none of the characters were properly develop. Overall, was a really bad movie.

The basic story is really compelling and has some unexpected, riveting twists. The production design reminds of classical wuxia-movies, but when it comes to cgi the smaller budget gets clearly visible.

The bigger problems are a) the sometimes really bad acting b) the sometimes confusing edtiting c) a somehow disconnected ghost story d) a massive pile of kitsch that is nearly killing the movie right in the middle. If they had spared some of those scenes, they would have had more time to let some of the really interesting characters unfold some more.

Summing it up: If you can endure mediocre asian kitsch you are rewarded with an really extraordinary story that takes some time to evolve and show its potential.

I had such high hopes for this movie and was sadly disappointed. It had so much potential. The movie is beautiful (locations, cast, costumes) but it was rushed and an unnecessary ghost character was added randomly. The acting from the main male character was bad. The ending was terrible.

The movie jumps from scene to scene so you don't have time to fully take in what just happened. It constantly felt like it was going from A -> C instead of A -> B. Because it's so rushed, there's no character development and you end up not having any feelings for the characters.

I read that they were originally thinking about making this a 40-episode drama but opted for a 90 minute movie instead. I think that was a huge mistake. This movie was so rushed and did no justice to the original epic poem. They should have made this a drama and stuck to the original epic poem.