12/08/2026 - Lê Bảo’s mysterious and immersive second feature follows the estrangement of two generations of a Vietnamese family and the strange audiovisual phenomena haunting them

Lê Bảo’s cinema, up to now, is one of uncannily offbeat juxtapositions: in his prior feature, the Berlinale Encounters prizewinner Taste, it wasn’t entirely clear what a Nigerian footballer was doing in a partially submerged Vietnamese slum, helping to communally cook with the factory workers residing there, but it created an odd cross-cultural fissure all the same. Hearing, showing in Locarno’s International Competition, ostensibly follows Ninh (Nsưt Nguyễn Quốc Tuấn), a middle-aged guy dealing with both his and his parents’ marital estrangement, whose job is to install decibel meters in a variety of public and private settings. Yet, when the sound in those environments passes a certain threshold, a blinding and powerful purply-blue light is emitted that engulfs every corner of the space; again, it seems very key to what Lê is fundamentally interested in, having auditory interference register more strongly as a visual or colour output.

With his South-East Asian roots, Lê has predictably and accurately been compared to Apichatpong Weerasethakul, yet there’s also something of Pedro Costa in his predilection for dark, cavernous interior spaces. Working with DoP Nguyễn Vinh Phúc as before, he has already imbued his films with a consummate visual beauty, holding their pristinely designed master shots just long enough to hypnotise and lull us, yet he struggles here, as he has done before, to access themes rich enough to distinguish him further, whether deriving from history, sociopolitical resonance or spirituality.

Over its finely paced two-hour running time, its first and second halves correspond to explaining Ninh’s painful and fractured family situation, before switching quite smoothly to the sensory experience promised by both the title and many festival films of this type (the Berlin-set Objet a at Locarno this year also fulfils this weird obligation for spectacular visual bombast at its end). Ninh has been living with his physically and cognitively declining mother, Khanh (Nsưt Ngọc Tản), for some time and makes visits to his father, Nhiên (Ming Hùng), who works as a hay farmer in the countryside. In spite of the fact that it was Nhiên who physically abused her, he prevents Khanh from joining these visits, where a reconciliation could arise. Ninh also feels shame for having similarly abused his ex-wife, Ngọc (Khánh Huyền), and is forced to meet his two young children outdoors in a pretty, yet quite dangerous, ravine, while Ngọc (whose new partner has provided her with more middle-class comforts) watches on in the background.

These plot details aren’t so much about unveiling the male characters’ toxicity and violence, as showing the isolation and loneliness they’re all consigned to while living in their various dwellings, which Lê shoots in a manner playing up their division from the wider world. A bit simplistically, the sound meters are interpreted by the director more symbolically, as instruments that can pick up discord of the heart and soul, and shine a literal light that almost drowns the sufferer and cleanses them of their pain. With a Dolby Atmos sound mix listed in the credits, Hearing exploits this best with Norwegian techno artist Mental Overdrive’s original compositions, later opting for another of the helmer’s trademark juxtapositions by giving us the unlikely tableau of the aged country farmers boshing to the diegetically played music in a local nightclub. Our five senses are all a way of literally “feeling” something; Hearing makes a case for just that as the most potent one.

Hearing is a co-production by Vietnam, Singapore, Norway, France, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Cambodia, Thailand and Taiwan, staged by Sensory Ocean Films, E&W Films and Kongchak Pictures. Heretic handles its world sales.