“A formal triumph that doesn’t quite stick its landing.”

Silence is golden, but that does not always apply to relationships. That is the gist of Vietnamese director Lê Bảo’s Hearing, the follow-up to his much-lauded debut Taste (there’s a theme brewing here). Like that film, the languid pace of Hearing combined with its relatively sparse dialogue and emotions (choices that are appropriate to the film’s themes) and some of its more idiosyncratic, almost surreal moments ensure that the film will find a niche audience only. But those with a taste for Taste will certainly find something to their liking here. A meditative film about the influence of silence on relationships (romantic or otherwise), that explores personal distance through sound, Hearing is a formal triumph that doesn’t quite stick its landing, but further establishes Lê as another singular voice in Vietnamese cinema.

Ninh, a middle-aged mechanic, lives with his elderly mother in a small house in Saigon. His parents, divorced, don’t speak to one another anymore, even though his mother still accompanies him when Ninh visits his father in the countryside; she patiently waits at a roadside eatery until her son returns to take her back home. The reason for the separation of Ninh’s parents, we learn, is that his father beat his mother. Because domestic violence is so often a cycle, the same issue has cost Ninh his marriage, with his children living with his ex-wife. He longs for her, but that door is closed. What he has is his job, installing decibel meters that turn on bright blue lights if the noise level goes above a set level. While his own life is marked by silence, his work reveals that sound can create tension, whether it be for monkeys in a forest or a restless ghost in a cemetery, and particularly between people.

Hearing is mainly driven by its aural qualities, not unsurprisingly. French sound designer Vincent Villa creates an immersive soundscape that is never intrusive, but plays with sound levels to punctuate the elements of a scene or the mental state of the characters. This is complemented by a score by Norwegian electronic music artist Mental Overdrive. It is sparse throughout, save for a few instances of loud, diegetic techno in a couple of scenes that can only be described as a colorful riff on Twin Peaks: The Return‘s 8th episode gas station scene: a group of villagers, all middle-aged and up, going absolutely bonkers to some seriously hard-hitting techno.

It’s a surreal image in an otherwise restrained, pared-down film that on the visual front feels like a marriage between Pedro Costa and Roy Andersson. Carefully composed images are shot by DP Nguyễn Vinh Phúc with very deliberate lighting, creating vivid, somewhat otherworldly tableaux in which distance, emotional and physical, plays as large a role as it does in the soundscape. This creates some stunning frames when it comes to interior scenes, but even in a forest Lê and Nguyễn manage to play with light in some of the film’s more magical realist moments.

Technical impressions aside, Hearing isn’t a film that can be easily explained beyond its basic themes. It is hard to extract a definitive statement from Lê’s ruminations on the connections between sound and people’s interpersonal relationships, especially because there is no real narrative thrust to hold onto. Like the audience, Ninh is mostly an observer outside of his direct connections with his parents, his ex, and his children, but even in those relationships a lot is not verbalized, which in turn means the emotions are not deeply felt by the viewer. Towards the end, as the lack of any semblance of narrative becomes even more pronounced, the viewing experience is reduced to visceral enjoyment. A pleasurable thing, for sure, as is attuning to Lê’s particular rhythm, but it leaves Hearing with a frustrating ending. That said, Lê mostly overcomes the difficult hurdle of the sophomore film, and delivers with Hearing another intriguing, opaque entry in his burgeoning career.