‘Hearing’ Review: Vietnamese Slow-Burn Is a Feast for the Senses

Locarno: The second feature from writer/director Lê Bảo makes you enjoy the silence, even if its characters don’t.

Although debut short “Coal” (2013) and the later “Unconsoled” (2019) break the streak, Vietnamese filmmaker Lê Bảo can already be defined as predominantly working within the realm of the senses. Award-winning short “Scent” (2014) led to “Taste” (2016), the latter expanded five years on as the director’s feature-length debut of the same name.

The 2021 version of “Taste” — which won the Special Jury Prize in the Encounters strand at Berlin — was very loosely about a Nigerian footballer recovering from a leg injury who made both a living and an erotic life for himself in Vietnam, as he took shelter in a barebones abode with four middle-aged women. Almost everyone onscreen was naked and regularly fucking for much of the running time (and rarely ever speaking); the physical intimacy shot in a series of still tableaux against the earthy-colored interiors of a curious limbo backdrop.

Few images in Lê’s follow-up feature, “Hearing,” ever quite sear the brain like that of a snail on a man’s penis in “Taste.” But his longest film to date — at over two hours — definitely benefits from a more palpable emotional hook at its center, reportedly inspired by the director’s own parents, to whom the film is dedicated. Unsurprisingly, hearing is the sense given prominence in the new movie’s aesthetic and (still) loose narrative, though intimate touch — from a late-in-the-film hook-up to an elderly woman gently rubbing rainwater from a roadside cliff onto her face — remains a crucial factor to some of the film’s most arresting pairings of sight and sound.

Opening in darkness with a cacophony of conversations, before a busy restaurant bar at night is visually revealed as the source, “Hearing” begins with lead Ninh (Nguyen Quoc Tuan) on assignment for his job. He works as a mechanic who installs decibel meters in public spaces and private homes. When excess noise hits the level determined by his customers, a purple glow is emitted from a lamp.

The degree to which violet light is featured in “Hearing” makes it potentially the most purple-hued film since the 1970s movie run of director Shuji Terayama (“Pastoral: To Die in the Country,” “Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets!”). Or at least since “Purple Rain,” with one striking instance of a public transport vehicle being bathed in that light seemingly designed to prompt viewers to sing “Purple Train” within their own head to the tune of the Prince song — or maybe that’s just this reviewer being loopy from the very strange directions “Hearing” heads in during its final stretches, directly preceding that memorable shot.

Back to the opening sequence, anyway, in which Lê tunes his film’s rhythms while Ninh fiddles with his own sound equipment. Even as the busy restaurant bar reaches blatantly excessive noise levels even before Ninh’s fully done with his equipment, neighboring businesses are already having their patience tested. We intercut between the restaurant and a flower shop next door.

While the film’s numerous exterior scenes in nature largely avoid the tableau signature of Lê’s prior feature, “Taste,” the framing and production design of the many interior scenes tend to continue that visual motif. In this particular scene, the positioning and slightly muted colors of the flowers on display lend the tableau a feel reminiscent of Roy Andersson, though the darker lighting of the room in general echoes some of the latter-day work of Pedro Costa.

This cutaway to the flower shop ends with one of the staff, in a passive aggressive display, purposefully dropping a large potted plant from his second floor onto the street below. The hubbub from the restaurant immediately stops for a moment (with Ninh observing the loud pot smash from an open doorway), before the patrons soon enough resume their conversations at basically the exact same noise level.

This early tangent away from the ostensible lead reflects a few sidebar points of interest that Lê intermittently visits throughout the movie, wherein briefly-glimpsed supporting characters struggle to vocalize their feelings in an actually productive fashion, allowing resentments to build up until they explode in an impotent or at least ineffective manner; sometimes explicitly real, some of it suggested as potentially imagined.

That idea of sustained silence haunting relationships and basic interpersonal etiquette is also present in the key relationships of the main storyline. Ninh’s own parents live apart and have not spoken to each other in years. Meanwhile, he is separated from his wife, who now lives with their two children at her father’s place. Ninh hints at having seen his own father raise his hand to his mother when growing up, never wanting to be like that, only to have fallen into the same trap with his own marriage.

Ninh lives with his elderly mother (Ngoc Tan), who’s getting increasingly sick. When he drives to visit his father out in the countryside, there is a ritual of him dropping off his mother to wander around roadside businesses and local nature, continuing on to see his dad and picking up his mom on the way back. Their prolonged lack of communication manifests in strange ways. Potentially connected to her ailing condition, Ninh’s mother has developed a habit for inappropriate remarks when clearly thinking fondly of her former partner, saying things to Ninh like how the way he squats when laying bricks in the garden resembles his dad’s body, or bringing up the story of the night she and Ninh’s father first had sex — out of the blue while they’re eating dinner.

Evidence of silence quietly (sorry) breaking apart one’s bearings bleeds through both the main plot thread and satellite storylines, which include recurring visits to a client of Ninh’s and that man’s own conflicts with his distant wife. The puzzling final stretch of “Hearing” hints that this really may be a more literal kind of contagion spreading across society; one potentially triggered by an otherworldly force.

It’s a mystifying but absolutely hypnotizing resolution, vaguely recalling that major 2020s text of strange-sound cinema, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s “Memoria.” The finale makes the prospect of Lê’s next potential dip into sensory overload — titled “Seeing?” “Touch?” — all the more promising.

Grade: B

“Hearing” premiered at the 2026 Locarno International Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.