Viet and Nam (2024) Review: Tenderness Underground

Is Viet and Nam worth watching?

Yes. Viet and Nam is a quietly overwhelming love story, a Vietnamese film about two young miners that turns silence, darkness and stillness into some of the most tender images in recent queer cinema. Director Trương Minh Quý trusts atmosphere over explanation, letting feeling build in pauses and glances rather than in dialogue or plot. That patience is the film’s great strength and, for some viewers, its barrier: this is slow, elliptical cinema that asks to be met on its own terms.

What is Viet and Nam about?

Nam and Việt are young coal miners who work deep underground, where danger is constant and daylight is something they only return to between shifts. In the dark, and in the brief moments of rest they manage to find together, they share a love that has to stay hidden, while both are aware that their time together may not last. Around them, the film widens to take in family and the long shadow of the country’s history, including a thread involving Nam’s mother.

Phạm Thanh Hải and Đào Duy Bảo Định play the two young men, with Nguyễn Thị Nga and Lê Viết Tụng in key supporting roles. Written and directed by Trương, Viet and Nam is a Vietnamese film in Vietnamese, running 124 minutes. It premiered at Cannes in 2024, and its director was later nominated for Best New Director at the Asian Film Awards.

Light found in the darkest places

The film’s most striking achievement is visual. Scenes in the mine, which could have been claustrophobic and grim, are shot with a hazy, almost dreamlike softness, the miners’ lamps and sweat-slicked skin glowing against the black. The effect is less realism than reverie, as if the film were remembering these moments rather than recording them, and it turns one of the harshest workplaces imaginable into a space of intimacy.

Above ground, the images are just as carefully composed, with long takes and a still camera that lets landscapes and faces hold the frame. The sound design, full of dripping water, distant machinery and breath, makes the underground world feel physical even when the imagery drifts towards abstraction.

A romance told in gestures

Trương is not interested in declarations. The relationship between Nam and Việt is conveyed through touch, proximity and the way the two men look at one another, and the two leads give performances of remarkable naturalism. Their bond is built from small, unguarded moments that feel observed rather than staged, and that restraint makes the rare moments of open affection hit all the harder.

The film is also deeply concerned with what surrounds the romance: labour, poverty and the pressures that push young men towards the idea of leaving. Rather than making those themes explicit, Trương lets them seep into the atmosphere, so that tenderness and precarity always seem to share the frame.

Where the stillness may lose some viewers

Viet and Nam will not work for everyone. Its narrative is elliptical, with important information conveyed obliquely and connections between threads left for the viewer to make. The rhythm is deliberately slow, and viewers who prefer character psychology spelled out in dialogue may find it opaque. The patience is purposeful, but it does mean the film asks more of its audience than most romances.

Who should watch Viet and Nam?

It is essential for admirers of slow, contemplative art cinema, for anyone interested in queer love stories told without melodrama, and for viewers curious about new voices in Vietnamese film. Watch it in a dark, quiet room, where its images and sound can do their work. It carries adult ratings in several territories, including R21 in Singapore, for nudity and frank sexuality.

If it moves you, try:

• In the Mood for Love, Wong Kar-wai’s classic of unspoken longing, which shares this film’s faith in atmosphere and restraint.
• Portrait of a Lady on Fire, another romance in which a hidden love is expressed through looks and stolen time.
• Call Me by Your Name, for a warmer, sunlit portrait of first love between two young men.

The verdict

Viet and Nam is a luminous, patient film that finds beauty and tenderness in the darkest of settings. Its elliptical storytelling will test some viewers, but for those willing to sink into its rhythm, it is one of the most affecting romances of recent years.

Rating: 4.7/5