Back Home: Tsai Ming-liang lets the landscape of a rural Laos village speak for itself

• Reviewed from the 2025 Venice Film Festival

After completing 2013’s Stray Dogs, the great Malaysian-Taiwanese auteur Tsai Ming-liang decided that he no longer wished to work from scripts. In the numerous films he has completed since – including Back Home, which debuted at the 2025 Venice International Film Festival – Tsai has adhered to the strictly visual, utilising a quasi-documentary approach, in which what little dialogue that features is either snatches of overheard conversation, often off-screen, or is improvised in a state of obliviousness to the camera’s presence and insignificant enough to require no subtitles. The most well-known of these post-lingual films is perhaps the ‘Walker’ series, which features Tsai’s long-time collaborator Lee Kang-sheng barefooted and adorned in a red monk’s robe walking in slow motion in a number of locales around the world – an homage to that indelible classic of Chinese literature Journey to the West.  

These films, mesmerising in their silence alternating with ambient noise, have served as a poignant extension of Tsai’s earlier narrative-driven legacy of societal outsiders coping with the pressures of life in neon-drenched urban milieus. Lee, who starred in nearly all these earlier films, is mysteriously silent and brooding, and hardly ever spoke even in these scripted dramas – the strength of his radiating presence overtaking any need for spoken dialogue. 

It would have been unsurprising if Tsai and Lee had continued on, working in this vein as a duo. But in recent years, their silence has been further amplified with the addition of a third collaborator, the actor Anong Houngheuangsy, who began working with the pair in Days (2020). The Laotian Houngheuangsy was, at the time, working in a food court in Thailand when Tsai met him. Tsai can speak neither Thai nor Lao, and Houngheuangsy doesn’t speak any Mandarin; so the two are unable to communicate using spoken language. This is incredibly intriguing, but also, given Tsai’s Zen-like proclivity toward silent observation, perhaps not only unsurprising, but fitting.  

To say that Houngheuangsy features as the “star” of Back Home would be an overstatement. He only features twice in the film – once, in the beginning, asleep on the night bus that will transport him to his home village in Laos, and another time towards the end, where he squats slicing vegetables while conversing with a female family member; Lee, for once, is completely absent, though has been given an executive producer credit.  

The real star of Back Home is the landscape comprising the unnamed village that Houngheuangsy calls home – a place, like many in southeast Asia, that is as beautiful in its remote scenery as it is empty in economic possibility, forcing so many of its young people to flee to distant metropolises to seek, if not their fortunes, then a decent living wage.  

We find boarded-up farmhouses, many of them on stilts. Children on a swing merry-go-round, a small dog trapped in the middle, trying in vain to exit. A baby calf half-buried in hay; little ducklings waddle past her head. A man tending a wildfire at dusk. A motorbike parked against a shack. A rural vegetable market, where all the vendors appear to be middle-aged women. A hen walking under a cow. Some goats, a slight wind ruffling the branches of the tree by which they congregate… 

Ever the wandering visitor, the traveller who feels as though he truly belongs nowhere, Tsai’s cinema comes encoded in the same sense of loneliness that we so often find in the impassive gazes of his muses Lee and Houngheuangsy. In such works, there is no story, no characters, just the scenery itself – which, to bend to a cliché, speaks louder than words. With these uncommentaried scenes of bucolic life, Back Home offers a compelling instance of film in its purest state and at its most narcoticising, calling to mind the great visionary of American landscape cinema James Benning.  

This isn’t the first landscape film that Tsai has authored in recent years; his short The Night (2021) gave us an incredibly moving evocation of Hong Kong in political turmoil. Back Home leaves us wanting to see Tsai go further in this direction, stripping cinema down to its barest essentials. Very, very few are brave enough to take such a radical stance with their art; even fewer, perhaps, succeed as brightly and compellingly as Tsai Ming-liang, one of the geniuses of our time.