Locarno Review: Lê Bảo’s Entrancing Hearing Stimulates the Senses

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Lê Bảo’s Hearing_ opens in the drunk cacophony of a bar somewhere in Saigon, but for most of its runtime, this enigmatic, seductively elusive film unfurls in a world that’s strangely quiet, a kind of liquid realm where sounds travel in susurrations. Quiet, not silent: what’s most remarkable about Lê’s second feature is the way it seems designed to reactivate your ears. To watch it, in a very practical sense, is to be invited to listen to the world anew, and pay attention to sounds that would otherwise escape your wavelength: milk splashing into a water bottle, bubble wrap popping between fingers, a single blade of glass tickling a cricket out of its hole.

Lê’s first feature, the 2021 Berlinale winner Taste, had announced him as a talent to watch in the vein of Carlos Reygadas and Apichatpong Weerasethakul, auteurs with whom the Vietnamese shares the same preference for direct emotional communication over narrative. Set almost entirely inside a dank, caliginous maze of barely furnished rooms stretching around Saigon—a vision out of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities—that surreal debut didn’t just look like a dream but seemed to move as one. Its plot was a string of sepulchral vignettes only tenuously held together by the story of a Nigerian footballer ditched by his team after a career-ending injury and forced to roam this dark underworld in search of his son. Hearing is far more ambitious, both in settings—the action here seesaws between the capital and the countryside—and plot.

Ninh (Nguyễn Quốc Tuấn) is a divorced father of two who makes a living installing decibel meters, a contraption that comes with a light bulb that flashes blue when the sounds exceed a certain level. We follow him as he outfits bars, private homes, even a patch of rainforest haunted by two massive and very loud gangs of monkeys. Mostly, though, we watch him long for his ex-wife (Khánh Huyền) and fritter away time with his old mother (Ngọc Tản), herself estranged from her husband (Minh Hùng), who’s chosen a hermit-like existence growing edible mushrooms in the country as opposed to sharing the same roof with wife and son in the city (Lê, who also wrote the script, sees both marital units as fractured by domestic violence, suggesting a history of traumas passed through generations).

That’s a significantly more complex narrative than Taste’s, but the thicker plot doesn’t necessarily translate into a stronger work. Granted, with only two features to his name, sweeping assessments of Lê’s skillset are fatuous at best, but I cannot shake the feeling that he might be far better at crafting indelible images than weaving them into a plot; at any rate, whenever the film abandons its free-associating sprawl to zoom in on Ninh’s marital struggles, Hearing threatens to dissipate some of its mystique.

Far more riveting are the moments when Lê, teaming again with Taste’s cinematographer Nguyen Vinh Phuc, lets his film wander free from cause-effect logic. How do you explain the coin-sized shards of light refracted from some invisible surface that travel over Ninh and his children’s faces whenever the three wander into the forest? Or the impossible calm that envelops an entire residential building somewhere in the city, so silent that you hear no traffic, no voices—only the swifts shrieking at each other across the sky above? Who are those scraggly figures stranded in a derelict warehouse in the jungle whom Ninh keeps visiting and feeding boiled eggs? The deeper you venture into Hearing, the looser your grip on reality is bound to feel—a measure of the film’s ensorcelling power.

There’s a kind of ASMR quality to Vincent Villa’s sound design, which can turn the most unassuming noises into aural spells, while Nguyen toggles between indoor sequences that recall the same penumbral, drab universe of Taste with exterior shots that mine the mist-shrouded landscapes Ninh roams for the same sort of magic that reverberated from another recent Vietnamese standout, Pham Thien An’s 2023 Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell. It’s no wonder they share producers who’ve also backed Trương Minh Quý’s oneiric Viet and Nam. And it bears noting that Nguyen’s deep-focus cinematography serves a similar function to Villa’s soundscapes, dissolving visual hierarchies and refusing to guide or limit your gaze. Instead your eyes can freely move across the frame, absorbing Nguyen’s compositions in all their minutiae: every tiny detail is granted equal weight. Taste itself plays a prominent role. Throughout there’s a sense of people turning to food (soups, eggs, dumplings) as Proustian madeleines, and moments heighten the film’s haptic dimension—a brief scene that sees Ninh’s mother rub her hands over rain-soaked rocks is one of many exemplifying Hearing‘s tactility.

If one’s to follow Lê’s logic, his next works will likely be named after the two missing senses, touch and sight (smell was loosely yoked to a 2014 short, Scent). But his approach to filmmaking is engineered to contain and tickle them all. Like Taste, Hearing often vibrates with the freedom that belongs to works brazenly unbothered with things like linear, three-act plots or characterization—and like Lê’s debut, his sophomore effort teems with images you may return to time and again. I remember Taste for a late sequence in which a giant hot air balloon is inflated inside a cavernous room. (Who could get it out of there, and how? Where might it fly?) Of all its ineffable passages, I’ll remember Hearing for a shot that comes right at the end, in which a strange, massive, turtle-like creature is seen swimming a river upstream while Ninh, in voiceover and between sobs, says he dreamed of his mother. Are the two things connected? Who’s to say. But how liberating to find a film in which these hallucinations seem oddly plausible, and searching for meaning superfluous.

Hearing premiered at the 2026 Locarno Film Festival.