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In Vera Miao’s debut feature “Rock Springs,” there is a wonderfully creepy doll. It’s a nod to classic horror movies that she loves, but in her film, even recognizable elements take on a much deeper meaning.
“There’s a lot in the film that is a reflection of me as a fan of horror,” she says. “I love a creepy doll movie. So I do intentionally subvert the horror tropes I include in the film. A creepy doll is not necessarily a creepy doll. You find out instead how it’s connected to this supernatural world. That reveal, I hope, comes back to the real-life horror.”
“Rock Springs” has a premise that builds and blooms over its runtime. After her husband dies, Emily (Kelly Marie Tran) moves to a new house with her daughter (Aria Kim) and mother (Fiona Fu). Yet in addition to catching spectral visions of her husband, Emily and her family realize that their new home sits on the land where Chinese immigrants were massacred in 1885, and there are ancestral spirits with unfinished business.
Miao says she wanted to examine real-life dark history in her modern feature.
“I knew two things,” she says. “I consider myself a child of the diaspora. I’m a child of immigrants. I knew I wanted to explore what it felt like to be part of diaspora through horror. What was interesting to me was the emotion about loneliness and being haunted. That’s obviously a ghost story, and that’s one of my favorite subgenres of horror. I knew it was going to be a contemporary story, but I did actually want to include some untold history of the first Chinese communities in America.”
Miao was excited to have Tran, whom she has known for years, in the central role, as the film shows a different side of her than fans might have seen in high-profile projects like the “Star Wars” series.
“I remember thinking she carries a lot of weight and gravitas inside of her,” Miao says. “There are dimensions to her that perhaps you wouldn’t see. You’d see a fresh-faced, young, innocent, naive woman. But she has a darkness. She has grief. She carries a pain, and she’s so bright and so winning. But that pain that she carries, that grief that she carries inside, is what drew me to her.”
Tran spoke about the role in the Variety Studio presented by Audible, where she says she was interested in the way that trauma spoke back and forth to her character from generations in the film.
“The grief exists not just in her present day, but also the grief of things that happened in the past, and how these things seep into our environments, into our energy. They can very much feel heavy and like a mystery, because we don’t know where it comes from,” Tran says. “I think that’s one of the most beautiful things about the script and the film is how she is working through these past tragedies that have been historically erased.”
Miao is acutely aware that “Rock Springs” is debuting at a time when immigrants are under attack in America, but she’s hoping that the work can be something that helps to contextualize their experience.
“Storytelling is the way that humans make meaning,” she says. “So there is no such thing for me as a story purely for entertainment purposes. Every time anybody tells a story, including when you tell your kid a story at night, you are making meaning together. I take that responsibility really seriously. As a filmmaker, I want to make meaning with people who watch the film.”
She is also hopeful that America’s violent history doesn’t dictate its future.
“I wanted to put forth a different path that could come out of this history where this family, which is really struggling to process death, comes across this history and, in the learning and the acknowledgement and the acceptance of that history, finds healing,” Miao says. “That is my offering, to perhaps what this timeline that we’re in now might yield, perhaps in our generation, perhaps in future generations. What looks horrifying and brutalizing now, and just like the utmost cruelty now, we have to acknowledge it, and we have to do everything that we can to protect its victims for ourselves, as well as for them.”
Ultimately, Miao is hopeful that, despite the dark subject matter, “Rock Springs” can be uplifting to audiences.
“‘Rock Springs’ can sound like a tragedy-focused story,” she says. “It would be a mistake on my part to pass up the opportunity to say that I think it’s actually a redemption story. I think it’s a story of healing. That was my intention and my purpose, and I don’t want the conversation around the film or the anticipation around it to live and die on tragedy, because that wasn’t the intention. It’s not what these fine actors brought to the film in terms of creating so much dimension to the characters. I want to let folks know that, especially in this moment in time that we’re in, where things can feel really dark, I’m hopeful that ‘Rock Springs’ is one tiny contribution to a little bit of light.”
Watch more from the Variety Studio in the video above.
English (US) ·