Don’t Cry, Butterfly (Mưa trên cánh bướm) is the debut feature film of Vietnamese director Dương Diệu Linh. Her innovative film, where family drama meets horror meets comedy, has enchanted its audience since its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival in 2024, where it won the grand prize of Venice Critics’ Week. A year later, Dương’s movie that so specifically reflects the temperament of Vietnamese women that she observed in her youth, now plays for the wider Vietnamese diaspora at Viet Film Fest 2025, both in-person and online.
Dương’s genre-bending film is a visual project grounded in northern Vietnamese proverbs and Southeast Asian folklore, even as it occasionally veers off into the surreal and supernatural. Through the character Tâm (Tú Oanh), a middle-aged woman who turns to spiritual/voodoo rituals after learning of her husband’s (Lê Vũ Long) infidelity, Don’t Cry, Butterfly explores the plight of women in modern society who work day jobs in addition to taking care of their husband and kids. Rather than portraying women as powerless victims and men as evildoers in a patriarchal society, Dương presents quiet men and flawed women—their questionable decisions being proof of their agency, even in hopeless situations. Although meticulously layered with metaphors and symbols, Don’t Cry, Butterfly is more fascinating than it is daunting, with touches of humor and subtle details that will make each rewatch rewarding.
The problems in Tâm’s family, from their inability to have a conversation during family mealtimes, to the father’s infidelity, are not unique to their nuclear family unit. Dương’s storytelling makes clear their ubiquity in society, first by reminding viewers of the publicity and extravagance of the wedding ceremony through Tâm’s day job as a wedding venue staffer, followed by Tâm finding out about her husband’s infidelity through a national football match aired on television for everyone to witness. Society will always be invested in a person’s marriage, offering unsolicited advice from day one, and even more on the day the husband cheats. In the scenes after, Tâm is busy doing damage control for her family’s reputation, which includes preparing a cover-up story that her husband was just showing a visiting niece around town, and enduring her mother-in-law’s scolding for not keeping her husband in check. She appears to be doing everything except confront her husband directly to let him know how she feels.
Despite the audience’s anticipation for something to happen when father, mother, and daughter take their places at the family dinner on the day following the news of the affair, we are as incredulous as the daughter Hà (Nguyễn Nam Linh) to see Tâm carrying on as if nothing happened, while her husband is in his usual indifference. The tension of the non-scene is only comedically dissipated by Tâm later scrolling through social media reels and streamers, who offer her tips and tricks for getting rid of bad luck and winning back her husband’s love.
The society-wide problems of infidelity and poor family communication is metaphorically represented by a leak in the ceiling that we first encounter in Tâm’s apartment, but we come to learn that there is a leak in multiple floors of the complex. As much as the women of these families complain to management for a fix, the male manager cannot help because the leak is only visible to women.
Don’t Cry, Butterfly engages with the spiritual and the erotic, enhancing a family tragicomedy with particular special effects, surprising soundscapes, and images that sear into viewers’ minds. It’s not simply that Dương’s story seems to jump between genres that makes it weird (and fun!)—it’s that she subverts the viewer’s expectations within those genres, like an anti-immersion experience that leaves the viewer to figure out for themselves how to react. For example, when the ominous ceiling leak is shown in the film for the first time, the accompanying music is simply a gradual pause in the drumming practice by Hà’s friend Trọng. Even before we visually move on from the leak, however, the romantic instrumental intro to a wedding entrance song of the next scene has already begun playing, which undermines rather than foreshadows how serious and horrifying this leak issue will be, as a horror movie might play up to build suspense.
As a Vietnamese-Philippine-Singaporean-Indonesian international co-production, Southeast Asian horror influences in the film include the Filipino tik-tik, a monster that comes from the ceiling and targets pregnant women in order to consume the fetus, and the Malay nasi kangkang, or “squat rice,” a love potion a woman can create by squatting over a steaming bowl of rice, mixing in sweat from her vagina, and feeding it to the man she wants to control. Dương’s incorporations of these influences through body horror in the film linger in the audience’s mind, long after the movie ends.
Vietnamese idioms and proverbs are key to deciphering the visual metaphors in the film, particularly the ceiling leak. Comparing the Vietnamese family to a house, the father is thought to be the ceiling/structure of the house, while the mother is the soul of home. Without the parents, there is no home for the child. The visual representation of the father’s infidelity (and likely neglect from the beginning of the marriage) takes after the Vietnamese idiom, “Nhà dột từ nóc” (the house leaks from the ceiling). There is a fish tank in the home, in reference to “Cá chậu chim lồng” (fish in the tank, bird in the cage), a Vietnamese idiom about the fate of women, trapped and without freedom. While these representations are straightforward enough, these symbols become complicated when Dương layers metaphor upon metaphor, permitting endless interpretations.
I am still wrapping my head around what the monster/creature in the film might stand for, revisiting when it appears to figure out the “rules” about what can summon it and why. In the virtual Q&A with Viet Film Fest, Dương explains that the creature is an external manifestation of all the negativity that Tâm has kept inside herself. While the ceiling leak begins because the man of the family is not supporting the family as he should be, the supernatural creature spawned in that fracture is nurtured by Tâm’s silent suffering and stubborn endurance. Scam or not, the “Master” who comes to Tâm’s house by her request to perform rituals to cleanse her home of evil energy certainly offers Tâm an outlet to acknowledge her pain and express her hope for her suffering to pass. Linking the daughter’s own methods of coping to Tâm’s costly “therapy,” the relief that Tâm feels after seeing the Master is connected to the amount of water from the ceiling leak that is dumped onto Hà’s face at the end of her meditation at home. That is, Tâm finds some catharsis through black magic, but the creature of the house, preying on female energy, can also redirect its attention to her daughter, suggesting a generational cycle of trauma that keeps the women in the family from finding freedom and release. Later in the film, the creature reappears in full form when Tâm seems to finally confront all her emotions. But it is too late—the creature has grown so powerful that it consumes her, the soul of the home. Tâm’s fate inevitably makes me wonder if she would have survived by continuing to be in denial of her emotions as she had been doing all along, or if there exists any solution to patch up the leak in the film’s universe. Perhaps it simply was that she had swept her emotions under the rug for far too long that any attempt to confront her husband would be futile.
It is also intriguing to consider the creature as a stand-in for patriarchal society and its harms. When the camera provides a blurry overhead shot peering down at Tâm and her daughter who are trying to fix the leak, we are given access to what this creature sees—we peer through the eyes of the patriarchal society that we live in, complicit and trapped in it ourselves. Women can see the ceiling leak and can be harmed by the creature, while men, despite listening to women complain, are blinded to the problem and cannot be directly harmed. The men provide women with tools to fix the leak (the management office comes by with leak sealant for the tenants), but this is futile. The men cannot build effective tools to solve problems that they deny or do not acknowledge (even if it indirectly harms them by destroying their families). Despite efforts to build energy and self-acceptance—as the daughter representing the younger generations tries to achieve with meditations and manifestations—patriarchal society keeps her oppressed. The patriarchal society that upholds marriage and the expectations of the housewife that will serve her husband and children disapproves of women expressing their needs, and the creature depletes their energy to restrain them from speaking up.
Don’t Cry, Butterfly is a film that only Dương Diệu Linh, with her bold vision that creatively taps into her Vietnamese roots and Southeast Asian influences, can imagine and bring to the screen. It is a movie that resonates with me as a Vietnamese daughter; in one scene, pausing at a crowded intersection, Hà yells at her mother, who she is driving home after getting her eyebrows tattooed, “Ai làm cho Mẹ phải khổ?!” Her public outburst of anger and grief lands nowhere, followed only by the absurd silence of everyone also waiting for the light. Scenes like this are among the many reasons why Don’t Cry, Butterfly will stay with me for a long time. Dương is a director to watch for Vietnamese and global cinema. We can look forward to more innovative pieces that challenge the conventions of film in her efforts to convey the complex emotional textures of a middle-aged woman’s life.
Cathy Duong co-hosts cà phê book club, a monthly book club that meets in coffee shops across north Orange County, CA (IG: @caphebookclub). She enjoys traveling to Little Saigons, playing V-pop on her ukulele, and analyzing diasporic Viet literature.
