Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell is one of 2024's most impressive meditative cinematic achievements

We are all wanderers. All of us navigate life without the answers or emotional security we crave. In response to that void, we wander. Human beings traipse across life, often searching for ways to fill that emptiness, to quell that wandering urge. Drugs, religion, athleticism, art, and family, there are so many ways we try to keep our feet on the ground. Yet we’re always compelled to amble off, those eternally elusive answers beckoning us. Phạm Thiên Ân's directorial debut Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell chronicles one such wanderer in Thiện (Lê Phong Vũ).

Ân's screenplay begins with a motorcycle crash. Thiện's sister-in-law Teresa perishes in this accident while her son Đạo (Nguyễn Thịnh) survives. This tragedy is chronicled in an unbroken wide shot establishing Ân and cinematographer Đinh Duy Hưng's default visual approach to Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell. Images on-screen won't just carry both wide framing and a slow meditative atmosphere. They’ll also emphasize the wider world around principal characters.

As the camera pans over to the crash, food vendors still serve up grub to customers and tourists act as if nothing's happened. Once the camera lands on wrecked vehicles and crumpled bodies, many motorists simply zoom past this horrific scene. This is an experience that will forever alter Đạo’s existence. Not only did he lose his mother, but he survived the wreck that killed her. The lingering psychological turmoil of that reality is staggering to consider. Ân and Hưng's camerawork quietly reflects the sad truth that even something this devastating doesn’t make the world grind to a halt. The brutal indifference of so many people to even the most harrowing circumstances appears with such quiet power.

From there, Thiện travels to his old hometown for his sister-in-law's funeral with Dao in tow. Here, Thiện tries to reconnect with a past he left behind by reconnecting with a former lover named Thảo (who is now a nun) and seeking out his missing older brother Tam. While walking across the rural landscape he once called home, beautiful foliage and a constantly foggy overcast surrounds Thiện. Clouds and mist consume the sky, which lends a compellingly ambiguous backdrop for Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell. The absence of profoundly bright lighting inevitably instills a melancholy ambiance. However, the foggy scenery also isn't instantly ominous. It’s not like grim storm clouds are always hovering over the principal characters. Nebulousness tinged with pensiveness defines these environments that perfectly echo Thiện's mindset.

These stunning backgrounds are just some of the many wonders within Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell’s astonishingly meticulous cinematography. Rich details in every frame keep you glued to the screen during Ân’s intentionally glacial filmmaking. This includes a visual motif of key exchanges between characters often happening partially off-screen. Thiện's conversation with the elderly Mr. Luu, for instance, often takes place just beyond the camera’s gaze. Viewers only see the outside of Luu's domicile or the Vietnam War veteran's various medals for long stretches of their dialogue.

Rarely do we fully understand the people we meet. Human beings are so complicated and nuanced. There are always layers to even loved ones (let alone strangers) that will be total mysteries. Answers to pressing existential questions are similarly often elusive. Thiện himself notes in Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell that inexplicable parts of reality frustrate him, like why he always wakes up so early. Withholding key visual information in conversation like Thiện and Mr. Luu’s exchange parallels the real world’s incompleteness.

Thiện journey across the domain he once called home is a staggeringly gorgeous odyssey. A shot capturing Thiện standing on the balcony of ruins, surrounded by omnipresent fog (it looks like he’s trapped in a void) is a striking image of such magnificent naturalistic beauty. One wonders how this shot was even captured! The camera then cuts to Thiện from the back, no longer surrounded by white fog (nearby forests and houses are visible from this angle). The radical new surroundings do not undercut the preceding images. On the contrary, it adds a new layer of depth to that previous frame. One of Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell’s most glorious images now reflects the malleability of reality. What looks like an endless void from one side is just a high gaze of mundane reality from another.

Within just these two images, Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell provides a stirring visual thesis statement for the entire production. This pair of shots don't just crystallize how the ever-shifting nature of reality makes curing our wandering urges nearly impossible. They also mirror the absence of one-size-fits-all solutions to the emptiness informing humanity’s wandering spirit. Thiện standing on that balcony looks radically different depending on the viewer's angle. So too do “solutions” to those existential woes appear drastically unique from person to person. Thảo has found salvation in religion, while Thien seeks other means of finding inner fulfillment. An elderly woman cautions Thien on the price of pursuing answers to matters like his missing sibling. She’s found peace in other ways either foreign or ineffective to Thiện.

The innately lengthy nature of Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell’s individual shots serves this aspect of the script especially well. An unblinking camera really reinforces the awkward distance between Thiện and the other souls he encounters. Verbal fumbles in an initial conversation between Thiện and Thảo at the doorway of a church, for instance, resonate as especially uncomfortable in this visual scheme. Glacial pacing further benefits sequences like Mr. Luu’s recounting of his wartime experiences to the film's protagonist. The extended images capturing this shell-shocked man hammer home the emotional anguish Mr. Luu lives with every day. He cannot escape his trauma. The camerawork and editing ensure that audiences also cannot evade his haunted eyes or quietly tormented line deliveries.

Ân and Hưng's Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell visual scheme astonishingly probes existential and theological matters in a fashion that would leave Ingmar Bergman and Carl Theodore Dryer proud. Such gripping exploration is extra impressive given Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell's quiet nature. This movie's restrained soundtrack consists of the chirps of distant critters, feet crunching through grass, or motorbike engines humming. The screen defers lingering images of fish quietly swimming around in a bucket of water, not a barrage of noises.

This sonic quality allows Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell to feel like the cinematic equivalent of lying on your back on a rolling hill on an autumn day. Here, away from the world (often represented in Cocoon through entities like uncaring motorists), you can hear your thoughts and contemplate the queries that the demands of capitalism keep us from often considering. Answers may never come, but what's the harm in thinking about what lies beyond the world in front of us? The lack of overwhelming sounds allows for truly immersive contemplation. Impressively, that universal experience is communicated through Ân and Hưng's deeply idiosyncratic visual aesthetic. Wanderers are everywhere. Less common are movies as precisely and beautifully crafted as Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell.