The Housemaid

• The Housemaid became the third-highest-grossing horror film in Vietnamese box-office history after its September 16, 2016 release, earning roughly $1.56 million domestically.
• It's a Vietnam–South Korea co-production: Vietnamese banner HKFilm partnered with CJ E&M Film Division, part of Korean giant CJ's larger push into bankrolling Vietnamese-language productions.
• The film's international premiere was at the first International Film Festival & Awards Macau (IFFAM) in December 2016 — months before it reached North American audiences at the 2017 Los Angeles Film Festival.
• Lead actress Nhung Kate won a Special Jury Prize for Acting at the 2017 LA Film Festival for her performance as the housemaid, Linh.
• The Housemaid marked writer-director Derek Nguyen's feature filmmaking debut. Before it, he was primarily known as a playwright — his play Monster earned an Edgar Award nomination from the Mystery Writers of America — and had produced several indie narrative features.

The ghost of the previous housemaid isn't seeking justice — she's seeking a successor. Her possession of the new girl completes a cycle of colonial violence where every oppressed woman eventually becomes the instrument of the next woman's destruction.

The film's supernatural elements are deliberately ambiguous enough to read as psychological fracture: the new housemaid's visions could be trauma manifesting as hallucination, with the 'possession' being her psyche finally weaponizing dissociation against her abuser.

The rubber plantation itself functions as the true villain — the ghost is merely its immune response. Every character, French and Vietnamese alike, is already dead the moment they step onto colonial property; the haunting is just the plantation collecting.

Vietnam, 1953. A French rubber plantation sits rotting in the jungle, and a desperate young woman arrives seeking domestic work. She gets the job — and she gets the master's eye. What follows is a slow-burn possession thriller where colonial rot, sexual exploitation, and supernatural vengeance bleed together. The housemaid's body becomes contested terrain between the living man who owns her and the dead woman who came before. Ghosts don't haunt houses here. They haunt the architecture of power. Nguyen's film dares to ask what happens when the oppressed finally get a weapon — and it's something with teeth.