179 min | NR | January 19, 2024 | Kino Lorber
Thien hauls his sister-in-law’s body back to the countryside and goes looking for the brother who walked out on the family years ago. Pham Thien An builds his debut out of long unbroken takes and unhurried silence. This is a film that dares you to stop moving.
Thien lives in Saigon and drifts through it without conviction. A motorbike accident kills his sister-in-law and leaves his young nephew Dao without a mother. Thien must carry the body back to the rural village where the family began and find his brother, who disappeared from everyone’s life years ago. The errand becomes a spiritual search in a man who has misplaced his faith. Pham Thien An turns an obligation into an odyssey. The film is about what a person does when grief strips away every distraction and leaves only the question of what to believe.
Le Phong Vu plays Thien with a stillness that reads as both grief and evasion. He spends much of the film watching, and Le Phong Vu lets us feel the man calculating whether to commit to anything at all. Nguyen Thinh plays the boy Dao with a directness that cuts against the adult uncertainty around him. He asks the questions Thien avoids. Phi Dieu plays the Old Lady as a keeper of the village’s faith and memory, anchoring the family to a belief the younger men have let slip. Manh Cuong plays the Priest with a calm that refuses to make that belief easy.
Pham Thien An directs and writes his first feature with extraordinary control of duration. He stages long unbroken takes that follow Thien through markets, fields, and fog without cutting away. One shot tracks a motorbike ride up into the mountains and holds until the road dissolves into mist. The camera moves at the speed of a person noticing the world rather than navigating it. Sound carries the film as much as image, with rain, insects, and distant engines filling the silences where dialogue would normally sit. The patience is the method, not an indulgence.
This is a debut that announces a filmmaker with a fully formed sense of time and space. Pham Thien An asks the audience to surrender to a rhythm most movies would never risk. The reward is a film that treats grief and faith as conditions you sit inside rather than problems you resolve. Thien never finds a clean answer, and the film knows better than to give him one. What he finds instead is the willingness to keep looking. That willingness is the whole point.