THE FUSE

In Vietnamese director Lê Bảo’s new film, an extended family confronts various rifts and estrangements in its ranks; years of silence must give way, slowly and haltingly, to communication. That the film is called “Hearing” might sound awfully pat, but nothing is so obvious in this sensuous, intuitive mood piece, which consistently surprises with its spare, searching narrative and radically layered technique. In his second feature — following 2021’s highly accomplished “Taste,” which won a jury prize in Berlin’s former Encounters competition — Lê continues to invite comparisons with rigorously experimental formalists like Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Pedro Costa, while cutting a path between closely observed domestic drama and freely ambient surrealism that feels his own.