Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell review – jewel of slow cinema is a wondrous meditation on faith and death

The question of what the title means, or what the movie means, remain open; even so, this is a quietly amazing feature debut from 34-year-old Thien An Pham, born in Vietnam and based in Houston, Texas. It’s a jewel of slow cinema set initially in Saigon and then the mountainous, lush central highlands far from the city; it is a zero-gravity epic quest, floating towards its strange narrative destiny and then maybe floating up over that to something else. It’s compassionate, intimate, spiritual and mysterious in ways that reminded me of Tsai Ming-liang or Edward Yang.

Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell is presented in a calm, unforced realist style with many long, unbroken middle-distance shots, with closeups a rarity. There is a flashback and a dream-sequence presented in exactly the same way, leading to the woozy feeling that past and present, reality and reverie are all folding in on each other. The refusal of explicit emotion does not prevent one fiercely erotic kissing scene, or a moment where a young woman declares her adoration for Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life and wonders aloud: “Why can’t they make movies like that any more?” I can actually imagine Bob Rafelson making this film in 1972 (at half the length) with the same narrative structure, the same elements of midlife male crisis and regret.

In the noisy, bustling city, Thien (Le Phong Vu) is having an unhurried conversation with his friends about religious faith and the meaning of life at an outdoor cafe when they are stunned by a deafening motorbike crash just a few yards away. His later session at a massage parlour is tragicomically interrupted by a call on his smartphone. The fatality in that crash turns out to have been his sister-in-law, Hanh, whose five-year-old son, Dao (Nguyen Thinh), miraculously survived. Now it is Thien’s duty to take Hanh’s coffined body in a rented van to her home village for burial (with little Dao as well).

This is also his own home village and that of his brother, Tam, Hanh’s husband, who ran out on her and his son years ago. Thien must make a reckoning with Thao (Nguyen Thi Truc Quynh), a young woman from that village with whom he once had a romantic understanding; she could help him to do something about poor little Dao, whose grief about his mother can only be guessed at. He must also track down his runaway brother and … what? Break the news? Use this tragedy as a path to reconciliation? Or make sense of his own life and his place in a vast, placidly indifferent world?

The camera drifts and turns with the slow deliberation of an aircraft carrier: characters will move out of shot and keep talking off screen until the camera catches up with them and they are back in the frame. A still tableau will turn out to be an almost imperceptibly slow zoom. Thien has arresting encounters: an old man who once fought with the South Vietnamese at the Battle of Vung Rô, and an old woman who is as enigmatic as a wraith. One entire sequence is simply Thien’s viewpoint, in silence, as he drives on his motor-scooter down roads where the headlights of oncoming traffic flare into a screen-filling dazzle.

Is Thien having a breakdown? Or are these recent, desperately sad events simply giving articulation to a breakdown he might have had anyway? If Hanh had not died, would he not have muddled on with his unsatisfying, anonymous life in the city, and never thought to contact Thao or Tam ever again? The panoramic intelligence of this film is a wonder.

• Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell is at the ICA, London, from 8 March.