The Immortal

• The film premiered stateside at the 11th Viet Film Fest in 2019, where it won the award for Best Cinematography for a Feature Film.
• It screened as an official selection at the 32nd Tokyo International Film Festival in 2019.
• Vietnam's censorship board hit the film with a C18 rating — the country's most restrictive classification — reportedly tied to its "bùa ngải" (black/death magic) content, a subject Vietnamese censors historically treated as banned "superstition" until rules loosened in the mid-2000s.
• Made on a reported budget of roughly 28 billion VND, the film brought in around 40 billion VND domestically — which sounds like a win until you factor in the roughly 50% cut Vietnamese theaters typically take, meaning it fell well short of breaking even.
• Director Victor Vũ wasn't a horror newcomer here: his 2014 stage-play adaptation "Quả Tim Máu" was already a genre box-office record-holder, so this wasn't a daring pivot from romantic dramas — it was him doubling down on a lane he'd already proven he could work.

Hưng's three centuries of survival read less like a superpower and more like a punishment that keeps compounding — every era he lives through strips away another piece of the man he used to be, until "immortal" just means "the last one left who remembers what he did to get here."

An's visions pulling her toward the cave function as the film's real thesis: the dark magic doesn't just curse the man who wields it, it reaches out and drags the living into his story whether they want in or not — a kind of trauma that recruits witnesses across centuries.

The dark-magic bargain at the center of the story doubles as commentary on ambition itself — every gain Hưng makes by refusing death costs him something a mortal life would have let him keep, framing immortality as the ultimate cautionary tale about winning at the wrong game.

A woman named An can't shake the nightmares pulling her toward a cave she's never seen — and when she finally finds it, she finds Hưng: a man who's been alive for three centuries and has the scars, and the body count, to prove it. Victor Vũ's fantasy-horror epic treats immortality less like a gift and more like a slow-motion curse, tracing Hưng's ambition, vengeance, and every ugly bargain he's made with dark magic to keep breathing across four centuries of Vietnamese history. It was one of the most expensive Vietnamese productions of its year, censors flagged it over its "bùa ngải" black-magic content, and it still didn't come close to earning that budget back — proof that living forever plays better as a nightmare than a marketing plan.