Hearing Review | Lê Bảo Summons Ghosts In A Reverie-Like Return

Lê Bảo is a sensory conjurer of the highest order. The Vietnamese filmmaker has a gift for accessing the most intimate tapestries of our lives, memories, moods, casting muted feelings through an evocative prism. This is on ravishing, all-enveloping display in his sophomore feature, Hearing (Thính Giác), that launches in international competition at Locarno Film Festival 2026.

A mechanic, Ninh (Nguyễn Quốc Tuấn) lives with his mother, Khanh (Ngọc Tản). The rift between his separated parents exerts a heavy burden. He’s haunted by the spectre of estrangement, the bramble of conversations that were never had and lay buried somewhere underneath the resentment and bitterness. Healing is a long road that doesn’t just demand acknowledgement but a confrontation of the hovering aches. Bảo has no interest in or desire for a simple narrative outline. He favours to create something richly experiential, the steady effects of which seem to reverberate deep within our consciousness. He’s mining the corporeal, listening keenly to our fragile heartbeat and connecting to reserves hidden within the earthly. Ninh’s mother marvels at a crop of leaves. Later, when the mother-son duo drops by the countryside, remote farm, where the estranged father lives, she brushes a rockface, almost surrendering to the elemental mysteries that have whittled the earth into its present form.

Hypnotic and deeply immersive, Hearing lulls us into an atmosphere of resounding introspection. It lets us be lost in a mesh of soft associations, interpellations. It’s a landscape of musing that takes on notes of anguish and regret. Two broken marriages gird the contemplative drama. Ninh can empathise with his mother who walked out on her abusive marriage. But the sins of the father are inherited by the son, as Ninh regrets being violent with his wife, Ngoc (Khánh Huyền), who too left. She has primary custody of their children. He gets to see them once in a while, taking them along on work trips to the countryside. His wife requests him to avoid propping up at the kids’ school. She’s moved on. But he nurses the gnawing regret for never quite being able to apologise to her in earnest. There’s indubitable guilt clawing at him. He has so much to tell his ex-wife, but he hasn’t found the courage and vulnerability to proceed. His life with his mother edges almost on banishment, going by the solemn air in the house. 

Our lives crumple under the weight of the unsaid, the unresolved, the unmediated. When too much time has flown by, conduits of possibility, forgiveness and some scope for reconciliation close. Life turns airless, dense and clouded with the repressed and denied. We can spend our entire trajectories chasing that spark where life can open up beyond its cloistered limitation. Things can brighten if we truly allow ourselves the grace and kindness and conviction. Uncloaking the heart can be a terrifying thing, calling for the most nakedly revealing confession. The thought that Ninh might lose the touch of his children too, his most cherished, nudges him to sift through his life’s mistakes with deeper, bristling urgency.

Ninh is stranded between a realisation of the mess he made and the necessary articulation to atone. He struggles to walk over. He can’t forgive himself for repeating what his father did. DP Nguyễn Vinh Phúc situates the human and the environment in a dialogue. Along with his kids, Ninh forays inside forests. He teaches them to absorb their surrounding landscape, admire a blade of grass, a lone insect perched. For someone whose job is to instal decibel meters, the countryside offers a dose of serenity.

Sound is fundamental in the film, as redolent in the title itself. It's a drama marked by absence, the plaintive notes. But the film is just as wary and quick in its rebuke of an idealised quiet escape. In a particularly telling exchange, rural workers interject Ninh’s envying regard for the setting’s calm. “We’ve endured this silence for too long”, they insist, questioning his claim of the peacefulness the place exudes. Initially, it might have felt gentle but gradually it began to draw everyone into fatigue. Instead, they prefer the noise of the bars, which helps them to be more balanced.

This external silence where nobody has anything to say to each other could very well creep inside homes. It is a reflection of what Ninh himself contends with, the phantom emptiness engulfing his existence. Editors Carlo Francisco Manatad and Dounia Sichov unfurl scenes with a tilt towards sedate acceptance. Hearing is profoundly textured with veins of subtle emotion. The most striking scenes arrive as sudden confessions. Ninh’s mother tells him about the time his father and she made out, the jacket he wore. She wonders how the leather jacket would wrap around his body now. Lê Bảo soaks us in melancholic longing, creating a work thrumming with metaphysical vibrations. Hearing is one of those rare films that keeps its embodiment loose, half-tangible and peculiarly out of reach. It’s an invitation to retrace all that we tuck out of view, pulling those to the surface. Luxuriating in enigma, the film’s mesmeric hold never slackens despite its indulgent expanses. The rigorous austerity of its composition is unshakable.