Film Review: Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell (2024)

In the opening minutes of Phạm Thiên Ân’s visionary Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell, the Vietnamese director slowly walks us past a rousing community baseball game before pausing at a crowded outdoor café where a group of young men intelligently discuss the existence of God, among other things. This long, single-shot scene ends with a fatal motorcycle accident on the busy street in front of the café, which proves a fortuitous event that underscores both spiritual and existential nature of the debate taking place just moments before and the film’s meaning as a whole.

It’s with this introduction that we’re acclimated to the film’s ethos, the patience its director expects from us, and the kind of composed examination of humanity we can expect from it and its director. It sets the stage for a journey that begins with an unfortunate death and ends somewhere deeply embedded in the human condition. And that it does so with the compassion of a saint and the eye of an astute auteur makes Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell one of the year’s most challenging yet rewarding experiences you’re likely to have. 

At just over three hours and without an ounce of traditional action to speak of, Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell may prove too much of a chore for those not versed in this kind of deliberately languid cinema. However, the wide philosophical and emotional net it casts, along with the almost epic nature of its search for identity, meaning, and history, is presented so succinctly and so beautifully that one can’t help but feel immersed in its events, people, and spirit.

As we follow Thiện (Lê Phong Vũ), first in the aftermath of his sister-in-law’s death, then to the rural village where he grew up, and finally on his quest to find his missing brother, Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell unfolds not as a traditional narrative story but rather as a series of encounters that help shape and change its protagonist. Along the way, Thiện encounters old friends who never left their village, a soldier in the North Vietnamese army with survivor’s guilt, a former girlfriend about to become a nun, and any number of strangers who help him and offer him bits of wisdom on his long journey. In this way, it shares a metaphysical bond with David Lynch’s The Straight Story, a fact-based film so divergent from that director’s milieu that it’s difficult not to cast your own baggage onto it in response.

Along the way, Thiện (like Lynch’s Alvin Straight) begins to connect with his past, come to terms with his present, and honestly ponder his future as he treks through the countryside in search of something he likely never realistically expects to find. Phạm often presents Thiện’s story as one of mystery and esotericism, but the “truth” of it all isn’t nearly as important as the sometimes uncomfortable self-discoveries he makes along the way. The odyssey is a slow one, but its beauty is a moving tribute to a country and its people and offers a profound meditation on the individual’s place in the universe.