Can Vietnamese film win the world?

Vietnam's film industry has enjoyed a remarkable run in recent years, producing record-breaking box-office hits locally and earning recognition at major international film festivals. Yet as filmmakers seek to expand their global reach, Program Manager Nguyen Trong Khoa and Associate Lecturer Doan Tuan Duc suggested that international success is driven by more than compelling plots and strong production value. It rests on a coherence of the narrative journey and the extent to which audiences can form an emotional connection with the world the film creates and trust its internal logic.

Why audiences everywhere understand tone?

Film tone is often confused with genre, mood or style, but the academics say they serve different purposes. Tone refers to a film's overall emotional and attitudinal orientation, whether sombre, ironic, hopeful or emotionally restrained. Mood describes the feelings generated in viewers during particular scenes, while genre categorises films as drama, comedy, action or horror. Style concerns the techniques filmmakers use, including camerawork, editing, lighting and sound.

"Although viewers may not share the cultural knowledge, historical experiences or social context represented on screen, they can often recognise its emotional register," Mr Duc said. "A coherent tonal structure can make a culturally specific story more intelligible to international audiences without diminishing its local distinctiveness."

This ability to communicate emotions across cultures helps explain why tone matters when films seek to travel internationally. While overseas audiences may not fully grasp every cultural reference, they instinctively understand whether a film is inviting them to laugh, cry, reflect, feel suspense or grief.

Problems can arise when a film repeatedly shifts between competing emotional registers without clear purpose. Mr Khoa pointed to what is often described as "tone hopping", when audiences become unsure how they are supposed to feel or respond.

"Tone hopping can be effective when it is structurally motivated, but detrimental when scenes appear to belong to different films or when the audience is unsure how to react," he said.

That does not mean internationally successful films have maintained a single emotional note. Some of the world's most acclaimed films move seamlessly between genres and moods while remaining emotionally coherent. In Parasite, the shift from comedy to tragedy gradually reveals how difficult it is for people from the lower class to move up the social ladder. In Get Out, the shift from comedy to psychological horror slowly reveals the dark reality behind the polite and welcoming image of the white upper class. In both films, these changes in tone serve a clear artistic purpose: as the characters discover their true situations beneath the initial fantasies, the shifting tone carefully realigns the audience’s emotions with the characters’ changing attitudes and reinforces the directors’ use of social irony.

“Films with tonal consistency allow audiences to remain immersed in the world on screen and sustain their suspension of disbelief,” Mr Khoa said. “Even when a film shifts between genres, it should maintain an underlying tonal logic.”

The same principle can be seen in celebrated international films such as Wong Kar Wai's In the Mood for Love, which sustains an atmosphere of longing and restraint, and Asghar Farhadi's A Separation, which carefully balances domestic realism with moral tension.

Can Vietnam find a global cinematic voice?

The academics believed Vietnam already offers examples of films that demonstrated the power of tonal control.

Tran Thanh's Mai became one of the country's biggest commercial successes locally while also securing international distribution. Its tonal shifts and occasional homages to well-known films are carefully controlled, allowing the film to appeal to a broad audience while maintaining its focus on the protagonist’s emotional journey. For Mr Khoa, Mai’s success demonstrates that stories rooted in Vietnamese experiences can achieve broad appeal when their emotional and tonal elements remain coherent and culturally resonant, stay within the boundaries of audience acceptance, and are supported by a carefully integrated fictional world.

A prime example is found in the works of Vietnamese-American director Leon Le. Both his films, Song Lang and Ky Nam Inn, maintain a restrained emotional register through measured performances, patient pacing and richly detailed period settings. Likewise, Pham Thien An's Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell, winner of the Caméra d'Or at Cannes in 2023, sustains a contemplative tone through long takes, stillness and a strong connection to landscape. "The film's recognition at Cannes demonstrates how rigorous tonal consistency can contribute to the international circulation and artistic recognition of a culturally specific Vietnamese film," Mr Duc said.

At the same time, Mr Khoa stressed that box-office success does not necessarily depend on tonal consistency. He cited Mua đo (Red Rain) as an example of a commercially successful film whose abrupt tonal shifts may have altered how some audiences experienced the story.

“Near the end, the film abruptly shifted from an ultra-realistic depiction of combat between northern and southern forces to a hand-to-hand Jean-Claude Van Damme martial-arts action extravaganza, before concluding with a melodramatic resolution,” he said. “This sudden change in tone disrupted my suspension of disbelief. The action departed from the film’s established historical and dramatic register, moving towards spectacle before making an ambitious and meaningful transition into symbolism and thematic revelation.”

Nevertheless, Mr Khoa noted that the film's strong commercial performance demonstrates that audiences often respond to a variety of factors beyond tonal coherence alone.

Maintaining tonal consistency is one of the greatest challenges filmmakers face. Investor expectations, censorship requirements, production constraints and commercial pressures often push filmmakers to blend genres and incorporate audience-friendly elements, even when doing so risks weakening the film’s overall coherence. In Vietnam, the strong influence of word of mouth can further push producers and writers toward tonal variety as a way to generate different emotional responses to reach a broader audience. Mr Khoa said that difficulties arise when those elements are added without serving the film's larger emotional and thematic goals.

To avoid this, both academics recommended establishing a clear tonal framework early in development and ensuring it guides decisions throughout production and post-production. Performance, cinematography, music, production design and editing should all support the same emotional vision.

Looking ahead, Mr Duc believed stronger tonal control could help Vietnamese cinema develop a more distinctive presence on the global stage.

"Making an internationally appealing film involves developing a purposeful tonal architecture. Romance, humour, violence, and spirituality can be blended and shifted throughout the film when these changes serve a clear purpose, whether by presenting the story from a fresh perspective or bringing an underlying theme into sharper focus. In this way, tonal changes can deepen the audience’s emotional journey with the story rather than simply create different sensations to reach a broader demographic,” Mr Duc said.

Story: Ha Hoang

Thumbnail image: Tima Miroshnichenko – pexels.com | Masthead image: Gorodenkoff – stock.adobe.com