Hearing Review: Listening to What Cannot Be Said

The first darkness is crowded with voices. Conversations overlap before the image arrives, leaving sound to construct the room before Lê Bảo permits us to see it. When the restaurant finally appears, mechanic Ninh is already measuring the din, installing a decibel meter that answers excessive noise with a violent purple glow.

Next door, flower-shop workers endure the racket until one man drops a large plant pot into the street. The crash purchases a few seconds of silence. Then everybody begins talking again. Few scenes explain Hearing so clearly. Silence here offers no peace, and noise carries no promise of connection. Both can become methods of avoidance.

Lê’s second feature after Taste continues his fascination with sensory cinema, though the emotional wound is easier to locate this time. Ninh lives in Saigon with his aging mother, repairing things for a living while his own family remains beyond repair.

His parents stopped speaking years ago. His wife left him. His children live elsewhere. Around him, machines measure sound with greater accuracy than these people can measure the damage they have caused one another. At over two hours, Hearing asks for patience and occasionally abuses it. Yet its slowness has purpose. Lê wants silence to acquire duration until absence begins to feel like another presence in the room.

Inherited Silences

Ninh’s mother, Khanh, still accompanies him when he drives into the countryside to visit his father. She does not join the visit. Instead, Ninh leaves her near roadside businesses or among the surrounding landscape, continues alone, then collects her afterward. It is a strange ritual of proximity without reunion.

Their separation came after Ninh’s father abused her. Years later, the marriage remains alive through fragments Khanh cannot stop retrieving. She watches Ninh squat while laying bricks and tells him that his posture resembles his father’s body. During dinner she suddenly remembers the night she first slept with him. Desire survives beside fear with an indecency that feels painfully human. Memory does not respect the moral clarity people acquire afterward.

Ninh understands his mother’s history because he has repeated it. His own wife, Ngoc, left after he became violent with her. One of the film’s hardest scenes has him admitting this to his children without allowing confession to become absolution. He knows exactly which inheritance he received.

There is something bleak in that recognition. People like to imagine awareness as the beginning of transformation. Hearing is less generous. Ninh can identify the pattern, regret it, hate the man who taught it to him, and still have committed the same act. Violence echoes differently from sound. The original blow ends. Its reverberation does not.

Listening to the Frame

Vincent Villa’s sound design turns ordinary spaces into emotional architecture. Restaurant chatter swells until speech becomes texture. Monkeys fill a mangrove forest with nervous calls. Basket-weavers work through small repetitive noises. Mushroom farmers water hay bales. Ninh’s meters translate invisible pressure into numbers and light, reducing noise to something measurable while every human silence around him remains stubbornly beyond calculation. Then Lê ruptures the quiet.

At a nightclub near the forest, villagers across generations surrender themselves to pounding techno. Older bodies move beneath colored light with an intensity that feels almost ritualistic. Mental Overdrive’s electronic music tears through the film’s restrained soundscape, and for a few minutes repression becomes physical release. Nobody explains anything. They dance.

Nguyễn Vinh Phúc’s cinematography finds a visual equivalent for that divided sonic world. Interiors are arranged with severe precision, figures often separated by darkness, furniture, doorways, or empty space. Purple and blue light turn familiar rooms faintly unreal. The compositions evoke the stillness associated with Pedro Costa or Tsai Ming-liang without reducing Lê’s imagery to imitation.

Outside, the film loosens. Forests, farms, wet stone, animals, and roadside vegetation seem indifferent to the failures consuming the people moving through them. One image of Khanh rubbing rainwater from a cliff across her face carries an intimacy no conversation in the film quite reaches. Skin touches stone. Water touches skin. For a brief moment, communication becomes elemental. Perhaps language was the problem all along.

When Silence Turns Strange

The dramatic structure grows thinner as Hearing proceeds. Ninh moves among his parents, Ngoc, his children, clients, and strangers, yet these encounters rarely accumulate into conventional momentum. A client suffering distance from his own wife repeats the central idea in miniature. The flower-shop worker converts resentment into one useless explosion. Other figures seem trapped inside feelings they cannot shape into speech. Repetition sometimes deepens the film’s mood. Sometimes it simply extends it.

That weakness becomes sharper late in the film, when Lê allows the everyday world to tilt toward something harder to explain. Disrupted sound begins to feel contagious. Ghostly possibilities enter scenes that had previously treated alienation as an entirely human phenomenon. Private silence starts resembling an atmospheric disturbance spreading through the community.

The shift recalls the uncertainty of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria, where hearing something inexplicable gradually destabilizes ordinary reality. Lê refuses to tell us how literally we should receive his own disturbances. The ambiguity is hypnotic, yet it loosens an already fragile narrative grip. By this stage, characters can feel like figures passing through an immense acoustic dream rather than people whose choices are carrying the film forward.

Still, the strangest idea survives the drift. Perhaps prolonged silence changes people in ways neither apology nor explanation can fully reverse. Perhaps families keep hearing what happened long after everyone has stopped speaking. Hearing leaves that frequency running.

Hearing is expected to release in 2026 following its festival circuit run. The drama follows a mechanic tasked with installing decibel meters in public spaces as he navigates the ambient noise and subtle sounds of his surroundings.

Full Credits

• Title: Hearing

• Distributor: Independent / Festival Release

• Release date: 2026

• Director: Bao Le

• Writers: Bao Le

• Producers and Executive Producers: Yen Huynh, Weijie Lai, Elizabeth Wijaya

• Cast: Ngoc Tan, Nguyen Quoc Tuan, Khanh Huyen, Vân Hà

• Director of Photography (Cinematographer): Nguyen Vinh Phuc