Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul has long held that audiences are allowed to sleep during his movies, and at his New York career retrospective earlier this year, expanded that “sleep is very close to cinema, the collective dreaming.” Well, Apichatpong-heads, we may have met his true successor. Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell, an unbelievable directorial debut by Vietnamese director Pham Thien An, is Weerasethakul’s cinema or slow cinema on steroids—at a gargantuan 182-minute runtime, even longer, even more beguiling, and at many times, literally hallucinatory.
Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell begins with a very open and explicit questioning of spirituality that takes place at a dinner table. Between three friends, Thien is the one who’s most lost in whether he believes in a higher being or not, and, after a shocking inciting incident, also the one who will traverse jungles and temples or churches in search of his answer.
It is almost impossible to deliver a verdict on this film because it seems designed to provoke dreams and hallucinations in the viewer. As Weerasethakul so succinctly explained, there is no shame in admitting that I spent half of this movie asleep, and that honestly might be the better half. I had several out-of-body experiences during this film, at one point thinking I was literally ascending from my chair, and often imagining lines of dialogue that weren’t actually spoken (it doesn’t help that it’s hard to parse through two languages of subtitles when half-awake). I’m afraid I can’t describe many of the most indelible and haunting images I’ve ever seen in my life present in this film, because I’m not sure whether they actually happened or not. So deep is the film’s mysticism that the film itself became quite mystical.
The film does understand, however, that it is not enough to simply provoke hallucinations and call it a day. It is a spiritual film, not a religious film, in the sense that its images are far too ambiguous and inscrutable to provide a clear-cut answer on whether God exists or not. But its final shot is suggestive enough to provide some takeaways home, and the value of slow cinema’s plasticity is that everyone will have their own different yet valid experience and interpretation of the film.
When everyone’s experience of the film is so different, there’s only one thing we can solidly fall back on—the very audiovisual text of the film itself. This is where Pham stuns because he is speaking at a level of cinematic language even veterans would be jealous of. In the first shot, you can already tell how many important details of the film (time, setting, people, etc.) he has embedded in all axes of the frame, and how thoroughly he interacts with all of these axes. Then he does it in every shot thereafter. His scene-to-scene construction is elliptical, but consistently disciplined; the sound design activates the same transfixing frequencies in an Apitchatpong film. There is an astonishing use of light and shadow, shapes and lines, negative and positive spaces to craft, again, some of the most otherworldly images I’ve ever seen in a theatre.
Slow cinema has had a great festival so far, with Lisandro Alonso’s Eureka, 82-year-old master Victor Erice’s Close Your Eyes, and films by Wang Bing, Ceylan, and Pedro Costa, etc. But this youngster’s film may have just surpassed all of them. Inside the Cocoon Shell is hardcore slow cinema—even more hardcore than Apichatpong, Tarkovsky, Angelopoulos, you name it—and I understand it won’t be and isn’t meant to be for everyone. My preferred level of slowness in slow cinema is perhaps at the Apitchatpong or Tsai Ming-liang level, where the themes of their filmographies more enthrall me. But I cannot deny the astounding level of craft and sensory experience this film provides. A few years ago, Chinese director Bi Gan made an explosive rise to fame on the Croisette, and there is no reason Pham doesn’t deserve the same. If there is an answer to the question of God’s existence, it is whether he wins the Camera d’Or for best feature debut in a few days or not.