Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell

Directed by Thien An Pham

Running time: 2hr58 | REVIEWED BY GUY LODGE

Le Phong Vu in Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell

As critics in the business of recommending films to people, we are all too aware that some sells are easier than others: you needn’t work overtime to persuade someone to see a film as starry and sexy and candylicious as Poor Things, for example, or as pre-established and eagerly anticipated as, say, Dune: Part Two. (Thumbs up, by the way.) Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell is, on the other hand, a hard one. Vietnamese director Thien An Pham’s bewitching debut features no names you’re likely to know. It’s routinely described as a “spiritual journey”, which has never helped a film draw eyeballs, and it’s three hours long, which isn’t a running time people generally like to see beside the words “spiritual journey”. Before you ask, I don’t know the meaning of the title, and the film doesn’t explain it.

With all that established upfront, will you take my word for it that this is a rare and genuine work of enchantment? Ten months after I saw it, images from Pham’s film (some misted, some bejewelled, all exquisite) reel through my brain when I least expect them; its characters’ stories and explorations continue to nag at me. I suppose it’s a spiritual tale — not traditionally a selling point for faithless old me, either — but its investigation is into the specific unknowables of human nature, not the vague otherworld above. I did feel while luxuriating in its three-hour procession of big, gnawing ideas and rich sensory pleasures that this must be something akin to what church services are like for the raptly devout. I know I never checked the time.

An extraordinary opening shot — a deliberate but riveting long take that drinks in a football game, a boozy lads’ conversation, a thunderstorm and a fatal motorcycle crash — is indicative of the film’s approach going forward: Pham is out to take things slow, while also cramming the frame with points of interest and curiosity, for the viewer to read and absorb as they will. There’s an unlikely, belatedly revealed connection between the conversation and the crash: Thien (Le Phong Vu), a participant in the former, is the brother-in-law of Hanh, the victim of the latter. The dead woman’s five-year-old son falls under his care; cue a trip into rural Vietnam to find the boy’s long-missing father.

Distilling the film’s plot gives it an air of sentimental melodrama, which it’s very much not: its feelings run deep but quiet. Thien’s AWOL brother is a macguffin of sorts, as the protagonist’s real quarry turns out to be his own soul, or perhaps just his reason to be. Is there much of a difference? Through this small odyssey, Pham observes formal religious ceremonies — this being a deeply Christian community — in intricate, stoic detail, neither complicit nor sceptical in his gaze. The serenity of the religious believer is what the film is after, by whatever means the heathen chooses to take. Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell got me there.

INSIDE THE YELLOW COCOON SHELL (2023) Written by Thien An Pham | Shot by Dinh Duy Hung | Edited by Thien An Pham