INSIDE THE YELLOW COCOON SHELL - Mark Reviews Movies

Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell, Kino Lorber

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Review by Mark Dujsik | January 18, 2024

Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell takes its time and doesn't amount to much. It's the kind of story in which the journey is more important than the destination, but in this case, the journey keeps circling around the same ideas, almost refusing to develop or investigate them. As for the destination, it's more a shrug of an ending than anything else.

The story, from writer/director Phạm Thiên Ân, follows a young man named Thien (Le Phong Vu), who discovers his sister-in-law has died in an accident, leaving behind her young son Dao (Nguyen Thinh). To fulfill his familial obligations to the woman, he has to leave his home in the Vietnamese capital city, which he and everyone in the movie still refer to as Saigon, to return to the village where he grew up.

That is it in terms of any plot, but obviously, this three-hour movie is about the smaller details of Thien's trip, his return home, and, ultimately, his search for the older brother who abandoned his wife and Dao many years ago. No one knows where the brother has gone, what he's doing, or why he left, and it's not until the third act that Thien actually seems to care about this mystery.

His mind is on bigger ones, established almost immediately in an opening conversation between Thien and his big-city pals. None of them knows what they're supposed to be doing in life, and nobody has any answers. They hang out and drink and go to local massage parlors to waste away their nights and days, and nothing really seems to affect them—not even seeing a motorcycle accident outside their usual spot. It's unclear if this is the same accident that kills the sister-in-law, which seems unlikely because Thien might notice something or someone familiar in the wreckage, or if it's just the first suggestion of something mystical possibly happening just beneath the surface of the tale.

Phạm hints at a lot here—from Thien's former and failed romance with Thao (Nguyen Thi Truc Quynh), to a scene with an older veteran on the losing side of the country's civil war who's still searching for meaning in his life without any battle to fight, to the protagonist's eventual search for his lost brother in a neighboring village. Only one element of the story seems to matter to the filmmaker, and that's the possibility that religion—and specifically Catholicism—might be answer to everything alien Thien. The movie lingers on religious ceremonies and customs, and apart from the vet, the most anyone speaks in the story is an older woman who had a near-death experience and attempts to proselytize Thien with her experience.

Phạm is sincere in presenting both the big questions and what likely seems to be his answer in Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell. For as long as the movie takes to barely establish either, though, the result is frustratingly shallow.

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